Question about the content-type meta-tag

[jozomannen]

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

1. Why I should use this meta-tag?

2. Is it correctly written? (just copied it from another site)

3. I'm programming in transitional xhtml, should I use content"text/xhtml" instead?

[Robin_reala]

This meta element replicates headers that are sent by the server along with the html file. The browser can use this element if the HTTP headers are missing (afaik). Your code appears to be fine (assuming you're using that encoding - I usually use UTF-8). text/xhtml isn't a valid media type; the correct media type for xhtml is application/xhtml+xml but this isn't accepted by IE, so sticking with text/html is the right thing for you. Remember that by using text/html with xhtml you're not getting the full benefits of xhtml, but that's a thread in itself :)

[encyclo]

The meta tag is quite correct as you have given it. The charset is vital as it defines the character encoding for the page - whether the text is in a western European language (such as English, French) or something else (Arabic, Russian, Japanese, etc.). The charset ISO-8859-1 is an encoding suitable for most western European languages. Note that the trailing slash at the end is for XHTML only.

should I use content"text/xhtml" instead?

No, there is no such MIME type as

text/xhtml

, and anyway you are almost certainly serving your transitional XHTML as

text/html

- there is an

application/xhtml+xml

MIME type, but it is unsupported by Internet Explorer and cannot be set via a meta tag anyway.

<added>Too slow!</added>

[jozomannen]

Ok, then I just use it as it is =)

Thanks for the help.