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!

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">

HTML UTF-8 Characters

• Basic Latin
• ABCD abcd 0123 ?#$%
• Latin Extended A — ĀĂĄ ĆĈĊ ĒĔĖĘ
• Latin Extended B — ƀƁƂƃƄƅ ƆƇƈ ƉƊƋƌ
• Latin Extended C — ⱠⱡⱢ ⱣⱤ ⱥⱦ ⱧⱨⱩ
• Latin Extended D — Ꜧꜧ ꜨꜩꜪꜫ ꜬꜭꜮꜯ
• Latin Extended E — ꬰꬱ ꬲꬳꬴ ꬵꬶ ꬷꬸꬹ
• IPA Extentions — ɖɜɣ ɘɫɛ ɱɷɞ
• Spacing Modifiers
• pʰ pʱ pʲ pʳ
• Diacritical Marks
• àáâã èéêẽ òóôõ
• General Punctuation — ‰ ‱ ⁒ ‼ ⁇ ⁈ ⁉ ⁎ ⁑ ⁂
• Super and Subscript
• C⁰ Cⁱ C⁴ C⁵ C₆ C₇ C₈
• Braille — ⠓⠑⠇⠇⠕ ⠺⠕⠗⠇⠙