HTML Character Sets
To display an HTML page correctly, the browser must know what character set (encoding) to use:
Example
<meta charset="UTF-8">
HTML Character Sets
The HTML5 specification encourages web developers to use the UTF-8 character set!
This has not always been the case. The character encoding for the early web was ASCII.
Later, from HTML 2.0 to HTML 4.01, ISO-8859-1 was considered as the standard character set.
With XML and HTML5, UTF-8 finally arrived and solved a lot of character encoding problems.
In the Beginning: ASCII
Computer data is stored as binary codes (01000101) in the electronics.
To standardize the storing of text, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was created. It defined a unique binary number for each storable character to support the numbers from 0-9, the upper and lower case alphabet (a-z, A-Z), and special characters like ! $ + - ( ) @ < > , .
Since ASCII used 7 bits for the character, it could only represent 128 different characters.
The biggest weakness with ASCII, was that it excluded non English letters.
ASCII is still in use today, especially in large mainframe computer systems.
For a closer look, please study our Complete ASCII Reference.
In Windows: Windows-1252
Windows-1252 was the default character set in Windows, up to Windows 95.
It is an extension to ASCII, with added international characters.
It uses a full byte (8-bits) to represent 256 different characters.
Since Windows-1252 has been the default in Windows, it is supported by all browsers.
For a closer look, please study: The Complete Windows-1252 Reference.
In HTML 4: ISO-8859-1
The character set most often used in HTML 4 was ISO-8859-1.
ISO-8859-1 is an extension to ASCII, with added international characters.
Example
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1">
In HTML 4, a character set different from ISO-8859-1 can be specified in the <meta> tag:
Example
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-8">
All HTML 4 processors also support UTF-8:
Example
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">
When a browser detects ISO-8859-1 it normally defaults to Windows-1252, because Windows-1252 has 32 more international characters.
For a closer look, please study: The Complete ISO-8859-1 Reference
In HTML5: Unicode UTF-8
The HTML5 specification encourages web developers to use the UTF-8 character set.
Example
<meta charset="UTF-8">
A character-set different from UTF-8 can be specified in the <meta> tag:
Example
<meta charset="ISO-8859-1">
The Unicode Consortium developed the UTF-8 and UTF-16 standards, because the ISO-8859 character-sets are limited, and not compatible a multilingual environment.
The Unicode Standard covers (almost) all the characters, punctuations, and symbols in the world.
All HTML5 and XML processors support UTF-8, UTF-16, Windows-1252, and ISO-8859.
For a closer look, please study: The Complete Unicode Reference.
