Is This Actually Important?

[Lee]

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

When placed inside a HTML page?

Im wondering if i can actually cut it out of my pages at all or if there actually is some kind of 'reason' that it is being put in pages when using a WYSIWYG editor?

Regards,

Lee

[Shima]

You need to keep this in order to be compliant with W3C standards. If you are not compliant you get a worse placements in Search Engines search results.

[GayGeek]

I would assume it is needed the page to be correctly validate. Modern browsers should be able to display the page if you don't, but it tells the browser what you're trying to display on the page (an RSS feed? A webpage? A text document?).

Leave it in your code. It should be there for technical reasons as it can help with older browsers correctly displaying the information on your page.

--Aaron

[vaqueros]

The part that says "charset=utf-8" is also important for foreign surfers. They may be set up to use their own alphabet by default and this code tells the browser to use the Unicode alphabet which can correctly display letters for most languages of the world. If the browser doesn't know which character set the page should be using, some users may see only gibberish.

Kevin