Is Character Set tag important?

by 11 replies
13
I read some place that your web pages must have a "charset tag". When I checked my pages, there is no such tag.

Searching on the web I found the following:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

Is this correct? Should I put this on my pages? How important is it?

Appreciate your help.
#website design #character #important #set #tag
  • When you are only writing your pages in English, you are lucky.

    Then basically you can't do anything wrong, but if your pages contain characters of foreign languages then you have to take care about those charsets.

    You have to save the document in the correct character set of course, too. It doesn't help when you say it's UTF-8 (unicode) but in reality its some ISO-xxx character set.

    This tag is also only a fallback solution, normally your webserver should send this information already, that's why it is called http (the transport protocol) equivalent.

    For further reading: Character encodings
    • [1] reply
    • Thanks Tashi,

      Do you think Google pay attention to it? Do they take it into consideration that the charset tag is missing?

      I have 100+ pages, and all of them are working fine, but I wonder if I should put this meta tag into each and every page...
      • [1] reply
  • I doubt that it really matters honestly if you have that tag or not though I could be wrong.
  • It is required in all HTML, XHTML, XML doctypes, including transitional.

    Not specifying it will be the start to an invalidly coded page.

    Google and all others recommend valid code..
    "Check for broken links and correct HTML."
    Webmaster Guidelines - Webmaster Tools Help
    • [1] reply
    • It depends on the kind of content you are posting on your site, though using it is no bad.
      • [1] reply
  • In my opinion It depends on the kind of content which you are posting on your web site, though using it is no bad.
  • Meh, I'm sure google won't notice, but don't forget it next time
  • Well, it's not important by SEO point of view..
  • Actually this code is important in website because it shown the content language that's why it important for any website.

    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
Join the discussion

Next Topics on Trending Feed