HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
content-type: text/html
This tells the browser to expect to receive an HTML document.
When you use the
<meta>
tag with the
http-equiv
attribute, the server
will add your name/value pairs to the content header it sends to the
browser. For example, adding:
<meta http-equiv="charset" content="iso-8859-1">
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="31 Dec 99">
causes the header sent to the browser to contain:
content-type: text/html
charset: iso-8859-1
expires: 31 Dec 99
Of course, adding these additional header fields makes sense only if
your browser accepts the fields and uses them in some appropriate
manner.
6.8.1.4. The charset attribute
Internet Explorer versions 5 and earlier provided explicit support for a
charset
attribute in the
<meta>
tag. Set the value of the attribute to the
name of the character set to be used for the document. This is not the
recommended way to define a document's character set. Rather, we re-
commend always using the
http-equiv
and
content
attributes to define
the character set.
