h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm currently taking an online course in CSS, and in the html file that is being used as an example there's a tag that I'm not familiar with (still very much a newbie when it comes to HTML) and I was wondering what it means/does:



It's placed between the tags

"Meta" information is used to describe the content of a particular document; it's information about information, such as the author's name, a list of keywords or a description. The meta tag is how this information is expressed in HTML.

The http-equiv attribute tells the browser it should treat the information contained in the tag as though it had been sent as part of the HTTP headers that the web server returns to a client - headers give information like the size of the content, its language, the date and time it was served, the type of server that served it, etc., etc..

The headers for this page (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/AddThread?inreplyto=5715870), for example, are:
Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 16:13:10 GMT
Content-Length: 25675
Content-Type: text/html
Cache-Control: Private
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Via: 1.0 GNMIAUB01-PRS04 (NetCache NetApp/5.3.1R2)

You'll notice that Content-Type is set to text/html, just as in your meta tag. The "charset=iso-8859-1" portion of your meta tag describes how the document is encoded which is important for international language support. ISO-8859-1 is the Latin character set, which is a safe default for documents written in English.

More info on the meta element at the W3C's website:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4.2

Thanks!

No problem.

But you might not want to use the "ISO-8859-1" character set, instead use the more flexible unicode "UTF-8", so the code you would want to use is



It probably won't make very much of a difference, but it won't hurt either. utf-8 allows you to use more characters from more languages without the text changing into odd things on other people's computers.

You can see the limitations of the iso-8859-# character sets here:
http://wwwwbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/user/czyborra/charsets/

But utf-8 covers just about everything. It's absolutely essential for a web page that mixes different types of text. With utf-8, you could include any character from any of these categories http://www.unicode.org/charts/

This is a better page, it shows them all:

http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/csettables.html

It seems ISO-8859-4 would be better for you than ISO-8859-1 anyway, if you don't use utf-8.

Thanks! *off to check the links*

d'Elaphant.

I usually use utf-8 as well but wasn't sure if it was wise to make my writeup more complicated.