Setting Content Type Server-Side?

[Al-Saeed]

What's all this about?

The HTTP-equivalent meta tag does the job of setting a page's content type, but if at all possible it is preferable to use a genuine HTTP header. With the meta tag, the browser must recieve the HTML file and then decipher the content type, but by establishing the content type on the server side before the HTML file is sent, the browser will be told what to expect before hand.

One way of sending the content type is by using a server-side scripting language such as PHP:

<? header("Content-Type: text/html; charset= UFT-8); ?>

If you don't want to (or can't) use server-side scripting languages, you might be able to go straight to the server with an ".htaccess" file. Most servers (Apache compatible) can have a small test file with the file name ".htaccess" that sits in the root directory and with the following line in it, you can associate all files with the extension ".html" with a MIME type and charector set:

AddType text/html;charset=UTF-8 html

Can some please explain how the above is used. I'm trying to learn (X)HTML/CSS, using HTMLdog by Patrick Griffiths. However I'm not understanding this part at all.

Thank you.