Are these Meta tags important?

[stevelibby]

hi all
Are these tags important:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 6.0">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">

do search engine take much notice of them? can i remove them, if i did what would happen?

[cmatcme]

The people who right their pages by hand :me: don't tend to use them, well even if they do I don't and have run into no problems. I don't think search engines pay any attention to them.

[coho75]

can i remove them, if i did what would happen?

Nothing, they just won't be there. Most search engines pay no attention to them anymore.

[stevelibby]

thank you, i was a little curios about them, but you have cleared that one up for me.

[encyclo]

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"> 

Declaring the charset is vital, either in a meta tag such as the one above or as an HTTP header if you are producing dynamic pages. You should not remove this meta tag.

As for the other two, they are simply a waste of bandwidth and should be removed.

You might also want to consider putting your page through the HTML validator [validator.w3.org] if you are not already doing so: it is a good way of ensuring you are producing good, readable markup.

[jimbeetle]

You don't need the two Frontpage specific tags at all. I think you can set FP not to include them in the first place, but am sure you can have FP strip them out when you publish to your remote site.

The first meta tells the browser what character set to use, that tells the browser what characters are allowed and how each is encoded. You can get away without one, but with the web being as international as it is, it's always best practice to include it.

More than you want to know, but here's the W3C blurb on HTML Document Representation [w3.org].