Meta Question

I need to know what this means

[Kung_Po_Joe]

Hello

I hope I have got the right forum?

Would somebody be able to tell me the advantage/reason for having this meta tag: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-(#ref no. changes)>

I see it on almost every page when I view source but do not know why it exists.

Any points of view appreciated

Thank you

KPJ

[Paul in South Africa]

Welcome to Webmaster World

The tag is there to tell the browser which character set to use when displaying the page.

[Mohamed_E]

Also required for validation, removing it from a page and attempting to validate at [validator.w3.org...] gave me:

I was not able to extract a character encoding labeling from any of the valid sources for such information. Without encoding information it is impossible to validate the document.

[waldemar]

For some further reading at W3C: [w3.org...]

[Mohamed_E]

Let me add this.

On one of my sites I am not allowed a .htaccess file, so I use the META HTTP-EQUIV construct in each file.

On the site that does allow a .htaccess file I have a line in it:

AddType 'text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1' html

which does the same thing for the whole directory. This, of course, is much simpler.

[Kung_Po_Joe]

Awwwww, that's bleedin nice of you all to help so quickly

I will follow your advice

Thanks

KPJ