The HTML charset Attribute
To display an HTML page correctly, a web browser must know which character set to use.
The character set is specified in the <meta> tag:
<meta charset="UTF-8">The HTML specification encourages web developers to use the UTF-8 character set.
UTF-8 covers almost all of the characters and symbols in the world!
UTF-8 covers almost all of the characters and symbols in the world!
Unicode Web growth
Learn More:
Full UTF-8 Reference
The ASCII Character Set
ASCII was the first character encoding standard for the web.
It defined 128 different latin characters that could be used on the internet:
The ANSI Character Set
ANSI (Windows-1252) was the first Windows character set:
Identical to ASCII
for the first 127 characters
Special characters
from 128 to 159
Identical to UTF-8
from 160 to 255
The ISO-8859-1 Character Set
The default character set for HTML 4 was ISO-8859-1.
It supported 256 characters:
Identical to ASCII
for the first 127 characters
Does not use
the characters from 128 to 159
Identical to ANSI and UTF-8
from 160 to 255
HTML 4 Example
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1">HTML 5 Example
<meta charset="ISO-8859-1">The UTF-8 Character Set
Identical to ASCII
for the values from 0 to 127
Does not use
the characters from 128 to 159
Identical to ANSI and 8859-1
from 160 to 255
Continues from
the value 256 to 10 000 characters
<meta charset="UTF-8">Learn More:
Full UTF-8 Reference