hey there, i make html and php pages, and i have never used the META tag. i know you can help your site get more hits with descriptions etc because search engines read that line of text, but what about the following example that is automatically added to any new files i make with DW (which i am new to).

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

i know i dont NEED it, as i have never used it and have plenty of successful pages, but is it RECOMMENDED and WHY? what does this do and is it on the RIGHT settings as i have seen variations.

how can i disable the automatic addition of this line to new files?

THANKS!

    Hi, I'm glad you asked. 😃

    The "character set" META tag basically just tells your browser what kind of document it is parsing, plus what type of Unicode the characters are in.

    This this case, iso-8859-1 is another way of saying Basic Latin-1 (english).

    So putting:

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

    Inside your header is perfectly okay. It doesn't cause any problems whatsoever. In fact, your better off just leaving it as-is. Your page can not be parsed as valid HTML without it.

    http://validator.w3.org/

    I've used all kinds of META tags - and they do work. Your site will get indexed in all kinds of search engines if it has good META information. So if you have any questions, just say so.

      thanks!
      i've seen frontpage make a different code to DW, is there any "best" meta setting.

      also if anyone knows much about DW, can you change the flashing "|" size, the object that shows where you are typing. - it's too big and covers a section of the last letter.

      thanks.

        Here are some vauable META tags which I always use: (descriptions are below each tag)

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

        This is the character set tag, which you know about.

        <meta name="description" content="mzanime.com :: Anime & J-pop!">

        This is the description, it'll get picked up by most serach engines.

        <meta name="keywords" content="Anime, J-POP, Movies, Music, MP3s">

        The keywords. Which will get spidered too.

        <meta name="rating" content="General">

        The web site rating. Its good if you make a site specific to a particular age-group.

        <meta name="revisit-after" content="1 day">

        How many times the serch engines will RETURN to reindex your site. This one is very important! (if you want traffic)

        <meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow">

        This one will tell search engines (robots) to index THIS PAGE only. But don't follow the links. Some search engines will rate/index your site by content. So if you have a PG rated site, but you link to a XXX site - your site might get indexed as XXX as well. 😃 This one prevents them from following the links.

        <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us">

        This is just another way of saying that your page is in english. But since the character set says that too, I usually just leave this out.

        ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

        And No, sorry, theres no way to change the size of the cursor. Atleast not that I know of.

          thanks for your help on meta tags.

          i am making a php page, and i was wondering what anyone thought about the need for the XML Declaration before th !DOCTYPE. the !doctype is xhtml 1.1

          if anyone has good links for CSS help, that would be great! i've made a good file already but need more sources.

          cheers!

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