Language meta tags

I know a lot of people don't pay much attention to these tags when designing their pages...but they're pretty important for people who flip between character sets frequently when surfing. I've seen a few threads that dealt with this in passing, but wanted to see if some of the more learned members here could enlighten me further.

Here are the main language meta tags I've seen:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-US">
<meta name="language" content="en">
and
<html lang="en"> I know this isn't a meta tag, but I thought I'd throw it in.

I know that setting the charset is pretty standard, but I'm not completely sure how important the other tags are. I seem to recall that some of them used to be recommended for Netscape browsers for setting the page encoding automatically.

The reason I'm bringing this up is that I do a lot of surfing between Japanese and English sites. Japanese sites are notorious for not using any meta tags, so I waste a lot of time setting page encoding manually. This can be really annoying. On the flip side, after surfing a Japanese encoded page and returning to an English site w/o any of these meta tags set, I can get garbled text. The problem usually shows up in punctuation, which become random Japanese characters.

My question is, which of these meta tags, if any, will help force browsers to select the proper encoding for the page.

Language meta tags

getting in the practice of setting the proper page encoding

bill

Eric_Jarvis

Mike_Mackin

heini

Eric_Jarvis

Rumbas

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