HTML: What is this tag?

August 2, 2007

When I start a new HTML page, the following tag gets generated after the Doctype. Do you know what it is? Do I really need it or is it excess baggage?

|meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /|
I want to code all my pages using XHTML strict doctypes.

This is Character Encoding (Google it). It is used to tell HTML how to convert bytes into characters and AFAIK it will validate as XHTML. If you insist on using XHTML, the content-type should be set to application/xhtml+xml, and not text/html. Unfortunately, major browsers and search engines do not support application/xhtml+xml, which de facto makes proper use of XHTML impossible. One can of course send XHTML as text/html, but then there’s no point in using XHTML.