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!
Note: 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:
- English letters (a-z and A-Z)
- Numbers (0-9)
- Some special characters: ! $ + - ( ) @ < > . # ?
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
<meta charset="Windows-1252">
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">
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">
Note: Learn More: Full UTF-8 Reference
HTML UTF-8 Characters
Basic Latin
Latin Extended A
Latin Extended B
Latin Extended C
Latin Extended D
Latin Extended E
IPA Extentions
Spacing Modifiers
Diacritical Marks
General Punctuation
Super and Subscript
Braille