HTML Character Sets

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:

<meta charset="UTF-8">

The ASCII Character Set

ASCII was the first character encoding standard for the Web.

It defines 128 different characters that could be used on the internet: numbers (0-9), English letters (A-Z), and some special characters like ! $ + - ( ) @ < > .

The ISO-8859-1 Character Set

ISO-8859-1 was the default character set for HTML 4. It supports 256 different character codes.

The UTF-8 Character Set

UTF-8 (Unicode) covers almost all of the characters, punctuations, and symbols in the world.

HTML5 defaults to UTF-8.

Example: Specifying Charset

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
...
</body>
</html>

Difference Between ASCII, ANSI, and UTF-8

Encoding	Description
ASCII	7-bit encoding, 128 characters
ANSI / ISO-8859-1	8-bit encoding, 256 characters
UTF-8	Variable width encoding, covers almost all characters

HTML Charsets