HTML Charset

To display an HTML page correctly, a web browser must know which character set to use.

Character Encoding

ASCII was the first character encoding standard (also called character set). It defines 128 different alphanumeric characters that could be used on the internet.

ANSI (Windows-1252) was the default character set in Windows up to Windows 95.

ISO-8859-1 was the default character set for HTML 4.

UTF-8 is the default character encoding for HTML5. It covers almost all of the characters, punctuations, and symbols in the world.

The HTML <meta> Charset

To ensure that HTML pages are displayed correctly, it is highly recommended to declare the character set using the <meta> tag:

<meta charset="UTF-8">