what does this head code mean?

[bobnew32]

I use dreamweaver mx for everything, and I see some type of info like this in most of my webpages in the head section:

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

[outrun]

Its a character set:
For more info take a look here

[icann.org...]

regards Mark.

[bobnew32]

Yeah but generally what does that stuff mean/do?

[outrun]

It tells the web browser which character coding to use, Chinese Alphabet, Arabic alphabet etc what exactly iso-8859-1 is used for I dont know most likely the Western Character Coding.

regards
Mark

[bobnew32]

I'm sorry to bombard you with questions, but is it necessary to have that information in the header? Or would it help certain internet things recognize that your site is in english or somthing? Thankyou for answering my questions.

[outrun]

It is actually a requirement, if you follow the standards which can be found [w3.org...] so I guess it is nessacery.

I say I guess because there are a lot sites that dont follow the standards.

regards,

Mark

[nancyb]

the WDG web site validator says the character encoding is a method of converting bytes into characters. To validate or display an HTML document, a program must choose a character encoding. For documents in English and most other Western European languages, the widely supported encoding ISO-8859-1 is typically used.

W3C won't even try to validate an html file without the character encoding.

<edit> ooops, now fixed. did it again with the "WC3" - must be my dyslexia acting up again :)

[DrDoc]

It is more than just a matter of standards... It tells the browser how to render any text on your page.

For example, say that I have my browser set to "Arabic" as default... Well, if your page is in Norwegian it might not be displayed correctly. Why? Because the browser will try to render certain characters in Arabic.

Now, most browsers are set to "Auto-detect". What does this mean? It means that the browser is looking for that very meta tag to determine the character set (or "encoding") used. What if you omit the tag? Well, then it will render any text according to the default setting for the system...

So, not only is it good style to include that tag (keeps the browser from guessing, and possibly guessing wrong), but it is also necessary if you include any "special" characters.

As long as you stick to only letters and numbers (a-z, 0-9) you're not using any of these "special characters"... which explains why most sites still render ok. But, it is nevertheless a requirement and should reflect the language used on your page.

ISO-8859-1 is the technical name for "latin-1", or "Western European", which English falls under...