The first line of the head element of a html document is usually<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<meta charset=\"UTF-8\" \/> <\/pre>\n\n\n\nWhat does it do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unicode<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Unicode lists characters. Each character in the list corresponds with a number. The encoding UTF-8 determines how these numbers are stored in computer files\/memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Example 1<\/strong>: The letter z is listed as number 122. It is stored as a single byte:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
01111010<\/pre>\n\n\n\nThe first 128 characters are the same in all encodings (basic Latin), so the letter z would be save without a charset specification.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Example <\/strong>2: The character \u00e9 is number 233 of the unicode list, stored as<\/p>\n\n\n\n
11000011 10101001<\/pre>\n\n\n\nExample 3:<\/strong> The Kannada letter \u0c8a has number 3210. It’s stored as<\/p>\n\n\n\n
11100000 10110010 10001010<\/pre>\n\n\n\nHTML-codes and entities<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
HTML-codes use Unicode, independent of the character set used. So if you type
ಊ<\/code> you’ll get \u0c8a even if you omit the charset meta tag or choose another one, like iso-8859<\/p>\n\n\n\nFor \u00e9 you may also use the HTML-code
é<\/code> or the HTML entityé<\/code>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIs UTF-8 the default?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
It’s sometimes stated that UTF-8 is the default character encoding for HTML5. But it isn’t. Not in the sense that it will be active if you don’t specify it. So make sure the tag is always present as the first child of
head<\/code>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSome links<\/h2>\n\n\n\n