HTML Forum

**small_souljah82** · 06-20-2008, 06:03 PM

I am using Dreamweaver MX (I know pretty old) to do my web design projects. When I select Make document compliant it adds these two tags

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>

At the beginning and

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

after the title tag

My question is whether this tag is necessary and what exactly does it do? Thanks in Advance

**wayfarer07** · 06:50 PM

I don't remember everything that this does, but it is a good thing, and allows the browser to display certain characters that it wouldn't otherwise recognize.

These days Dreamweaver defaults to utf-8, but if information from a database is having trouble displaying on one of my webpages, often a fix is to switch the encoding to iso-8859.

**LadynRed** · 06-20-2008, 08:48 PM

Actually, you don't need that XML tag unless you intend to serve your pages AS XML. In addition to that, leaving that link ABOVE the doctype will throw IE into QUIRKS mode - which you definitely do NOT want!

**ForrestCroce** · 06-20-2008, 09:05 PM

Isn't IE always in quirks mode?

Sorry, couldn't help it.

**small_souljah82** · 06-21-2008, 12:03 PM

So are you saying that I shouldn't leave it about the doc type and if so, where should I place it. Also as ForrestCroce asked, is IE always in Quirks mode?

**wayfarer07** · 06-21-2008, 03:57 PM

He was being sarcastic. Pay no attention to that silly old man.

**SillyWilly** · 06-23-2008, 02:35 AM

Just remove <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>.

**e11world** · 06-19-2009, 08:24 PM

I know this is a year old but I'm hoping I'd still get an answer.
I'm working on a project and the client is saying that <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?> is making the font/text look bigger/smaller and I think even blaming alignment or something like that.
I just want to make sure of this. Does that code change anything about how the font/text renders or aligns?
Please answer me if you can. Thanks everyone!

**LadynRed** · 06-19-2009, 08:57 PM

Quote:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>

Not specifically, but as stated before, it will throw IE into Quirks Mode, which will yield some odd results. Just remove it, unless you're serving your pages as XML, it's not needed.

**e11world** · 06-19-2009, 10:23 PM

Thanks for the reply. Well I won't be using it but the client claims that because of this tag, the font/text looks different and I just want to proof that it has nothing to do with that.
I guess I can ask this here too. The page looked like this

HTML Code:

<HTML>
<BODY>
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
content here
</body>
</html>
</BODY>
</HTML>

So basically, it had an extra html and body tags wrapping everything. Will this make any changes to the text/font?

**LadynRed** · 06-20-2009, 09:29 AM

It will throw errors but should not have any effect on the text/font.
What font is being used for the page ??

**CWebguy** · 06-20-2009, 11:41 AM

You should use stylesheets to change your font, and definitely get rid of the XML tag unless you are trying to create a feed

**e11world** · 06-20-2009, 02:05 PM

Well this isn't my site/code. It was done almost 10 years ago using C or C++ i believe. I can't start all over but they need a small fix and they're blaming its our (my company's) fault for the text not rendering correctly or something like that. They're using Arial (in a style sheet after taking out all the ugly font and inline styling tags).
I just want to be 100% sure of this tag not effecting fonts at all. (or the extra html and body tags)

**LadynRed** · 06-20-2009, 03:50 PM

The XML declaration would not be the cause of font changes. However, if they are on a machine that does not have Arial installed, they WILL see a font substitution. Once upon a time, Macs didn't have Arial, they used Geneva I believe, could still be that way, I don't know. If ONLY Arial is defined for the font-family in the CSS, substitution would occur.

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