HTML Encoding (Character Sets)
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!
Unicode Web growth
Learn More:
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">
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:
HTML UTF-8 Characters
ABCD abcd 0123 ?#$%
ĀĂĄ ĆĈĊ ĒĔĖĘ
ƀƁƂƃƄƅ ƆƇƈ ƉƊƋƌ
ⱠⱡⱢ ⱣⱤ ⱥⱦ ⱧⱨⱩ
Ꜧꜧ ꜨꜩꜪꜫ ꜬꜭꜮꜯ
ꬰꬱ ꬲꬳꬴ ꬵꬶ ꬷꬸꬹ
ɖɜɣ ɘɫɛ ɱɷɞ
pʰ pʱ pʲ pʳ
àáâã èéêẽ òóôõ
‰ ‱ ⁒ ‼ ⁇ ⁈ ⁉ ⁎ ⁑ ⁂
C⁰ Cⁱ C⁴ C⁵ C₆ C₇ C₈
⠓⠑⠇⠇⠕ ⠺⠕⠗⠇⠙