Preserved Topic: What is this?????????? (Page 1 of 1)

Ok.. it layman terms.. simple... what the heck is this tag mean and what does it do and is it necessary???

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

That's you character set. Check out http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/charset.html#doc-char-set

Berners-Lee, et al Informational [Page 16]

RFC 1945 HTTP/1.0 May 1996


presentation, request logging, etc.

3.4 Character Sets

HTTP uses the same definition of the term "character set" as that
described for MIME:

The term "character set" is used in this document to refer to a
method used with one or more tables to convert a sequence of
octets into a sequence of characters. Note that unconditional
conversion in the other direction is not required, in that not all
characters may be available in a given character set and a
character set may provide more than one sequence of octets to
represent a particular character. This definition is intended to
allow various kinds of character encodings, from simple single-
table mappings such as US-ASCII to complex table switching methods
such as those that use ISO 2022's techniques. However, the
definition associated with a MIME character set name must fully
specify the mapping to be performed from octets to characters. In
particular, use of external profiling information to determine the
exact mapping is not permitted.

Note: This use of the term "character set" is more commonly
referred to as a "character encoding." However, since HTTP and
MIME share the same registry, it is important that the terminology
also be shared.

HTTP character sets are identified by case-insensitive tokens. The
complete set of tokens are defined by the IANA Character Set registry
[15]. However, because that registry does not define a single,
consistent token for each character set, we define here the preferred
names for those character sets most likely to be used with HTTP
entities. These character sets include those registered by RFC 1521
[5] -- the US-ASCII [17] and ISO-8859 [18] character sets -- and
other names specifically recommended for use within MIME charset
parameters.

charset = "US-ASCII"

So in other words it isn't Absolutely necessary?

It's necessary to use that tag <META> tag, if your web site isn't written in English language (i.e. Serbian, which is Cyrillic based), so that web browser knows what character set to use...

And if you don't use one, that's the second thing a validator will complain about (that it's missing).

for example, this is for arabic characters:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1256">