.htaccess with sth like Redirect 402 / ErrorDocument 402 "Payment Required" For 2.0.54 and 1.3.33 this yields in HTTP/1.1 402 Payment Required Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 23:33:07 GMT Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 The Content-Type should be text/plain;charset=<.htaccess encoding> or at least the DefaultType. Or failing that this behavior should be documented.
For 1.3: See suppress-error-charset description at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/env.html That will suppress the automatic "charset=iso-8859-1", if you can manage to set suppress-error-charset for the appropriate set of requests. Those docs say that it is in Apache >= 2.0.40, but it won't be in Apache 2.0 until 2.0.55.
The main concern is that it uses text/html even though most people probably would not use a complete HTML document in ErrorDocument directive. So the "redirect" in the suppress-error-charset refers to any "Redirect" redirect? Since for the "Redirect 402 /" directive Apache would not generate a redirect in HTTP terms. From the documentation I'd call it suppress-redirect-charset.
I don't see the harm here in using text/html. For any short piece of text it is going to look the same regardless of the content-type, and this allows you to use some simple html if you want to.