The character-set tells the browser how to interpret and display the characters on your webpage. Depending on the language of the text on the page it might be necessary to force the browser to another character set.
The most common used character sets are:
A few examples:
UTF-8 (UNICODE)
ISO-8859-1 (Western)
ISO-8859-2 (Central European)
ISO-8859-3 (South European)
ISO-8859-4 (Baltic)
ISO-8859-5 (Cyrillic)
ISO-8859-7 (Greek)
ISO-8859-9 (Turkish)
ISO-8859-10 (Nordic)
ISO-8859-13 (Baltic)
ISO-8859-14 (Celtic)
ISO-8859-15 (Western)
ISO-8859-16 (Romanian)
Windows 1250 (Central Europe)
Windows 1251 (Cyrillic)
Windows 1252 (Latin 1)
Windows 1253 (Greek)
Windows 1254 (Turkish)
Windows 1255 (Hebrew)
Windows 1256 (Arabic)
Windows 1257 (Baltic)
Windows 1258 (Vietnam)
ISO-8859-6 (Arabic)
ISO-8859-8 (Hebrew Visual)
More details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_ ... gs_in_HTML