Head First HTML with CSS

using to specify a content type
Adding a tag to specify the content type
Most of you reading this book are probably using English or Western-European
languages (the so-called “Latin” languages), so you’ll need a tag in your
HTML that looks like this:
You’re going to throw this line in as the first thing inside the element of your
HTML. This tag tells any browser the content type of your file, and what kinds of
characters are used to encode it. Let’s look at the tag in a little more detail...
“meta” means we’re
going to tell the
browser something
about the page...
Just like other HTML tags, the
tag has attributes.
240 Chapter 6
And we’re going to
tell it something
more about the
content type of
the page.
The content attribute
is where we specify
the content type
information.
Q: DOCTYPES, tags... ugh, do I need to really
remember all this to write Web pages?
A: Specifying a DOCTYPE and a content tag
are kind of like taxes: you gotta do them to be compliant. Look
at it this way: you already understand them more than 99% of
the Web page writing population, which is great. But at the end
of the day, everyone just puts the DOCTYPE and tag in
their HTML and moves on with life. So make sure you’ve got the
right DOCTYPE and tag and then go do something much
more fun.
First we tell it that this is an HTML
file. This is a bit redundant, because the
browser already knows that (remember we
told it that in the DOCTYPE as well).
there are no
Dumb Questions
Q: ISO-8859-1?
Here’s the new part; this tells
the browser that we’re using
the ISO-8859-1 character
encoding.
Notice that this whole
string is the value of the
content attribute.
A: Work with us here. It’s like WD-40; you don’t worry about
why it’s called that, you just use it.
ISO-8859-1 is the character encoding for “Latin-1” characters,
which can represent almost all the European languages. If
you’re writing in another language, check out the information on
character encoding at
http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset.html.