isaac - 7:09 am on Sep 5, 2012 (gmt 0)

in dreamweaver i start a new document expecting it to be blank and under head this comes up:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

what does it mean? i know quite a lot of code but i am still fairly new to this.
any help would be greatly appreciated.
thankyou! :)