To display an HTML page correctly, a web browser must know which character set (character encoding) to use.
What is Character Encoding?
ASCII was the first character encoding standard (also called character set). ASCII defined 128 different alphanumeric characters that could be used on the internet: numbers (0-9), English letters (A-Z), and some special characters like ! $ + - ( ) @ < > .
ANSI (Windows-1252) was the original Windows character set, with support for 256 different character codes.
ISO-8859-1 was the default character set for HTML 4. This character set also supported 256 different character codes.
Because ANSI and ISO-8859-1 were so limited, HTML 4 also supported UTF-8.
UTF-8 (Unicode) covers almost all of the characters and symbols in the world.
The default character encoding for HTML5 is UTF-8.
The HTML charset Attribute
To display an HTML page correctly, a web browser must know the character set used in the page.
This is specified in the <meta> tag:
For HTML4:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1">
For HTML5:
<meta charset="UTF-8">
