query about meta tags

[damon2003]

Hi,
my editor automatically puts this in the meta content tag, what does it mean?

text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

[pyro]

It is used to specify which character encoding you are using for your documents, and it (or another) should be included on each document that you create.

[Robert Wellock]

In other words it defines the byte-order of your document and UTF-8 is generally used for XHTML and XML. Also the text/html is a MIME statement telling the browser you are using ASCII text as HTML.