meta tag vs header()

nrg_alpha

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

header('Content-type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1');

Curiously, I read somewhere that it is better to declare your character set via http headers as opposed to using the meta tag method. Is this accurate? If so, why?

Cheers,

NRG

bpat1434

I don't particularly see the difference. By the time the page is being rendered, the headers are already parsed and the browser will display it in whatever character set you selected. So either way, the "hacker" would need t edit the physical sending of headers or the HTML response prior to interpretation by the browser. They would seem to me to be equal. Would it be wrong to send both?

NogDog

A charset setting in a Contetn-Type HTTP header takes priority over that in a meta tag (per the HTML spec., anyway), so setting it in the header should be the surest way of getting what you want. As bpat1434 points out, there's nothing stopping you from using both. In fact, you could do that and add a charset attribute to your <body> tag, then you'll be the proverbial man who wears both a belt and suspenders while carrying a roll of string in his pocket just in case.

nrg_alpha

Thanks for the response guys. I'll sweep through my pages and add both.

Cheers,

NRG

Weedpacket

The idea of http-equiv META tags is that they provide an equivalent for HTTP headers; HTML authors can use them to specify additional HTTP headers (without having to muck around with anything serverside). Servers and proxies are free to look inside any HTML pages they serve and add any http-equivs they find to the response's real headers (though off-hand I don't know of any that do), and browsers are free to treat http-equivs as though they had been part of the response's list of real headers.

All HTTP responses have HTTP headers by definition, but not all responses contain HTML pages. It just so happens that the latter provides a mechanism to tweak the former.