response header VS meta tag

Question

I can declare some info, like encoding and language, in meta-tag or in response-header.
My question: what the best way (maybe them both), for SEO and old-browsers?

meta-tag example:

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

(PHP) header example:

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

What's better ?

Answer 1

Meta http-equiv is little more than a joke. When specifying Content-Type with it, only the charset section counts for anything, and then only when the real HTTP headers fail to specify the encoding.

Answer 2

Do both. The header takes precedence, but if the HTML page is accessed locally, there are no HTTP-headers, so you want to have <meta charset="..."> as a safety mechanism.