does it matter at all what order the or
or
tags are in in the
It's recommended to put the meta tag with the character encoding as high as possible. If the encoding is not included in (or differs from) the response header of the requested page, the browser will have to guess what the encoding is. Only when it finds this meta tag it knows what it is dealing with and it will have to read everything it has already parsed again.
See for instance Methods for indicating the character set.