Character encoding is a system that pairs each character from a given set with something else—such as a number or bit pattern—to facilitate the storage and transmission of text through digital mediums. It is essentially a key that pairs each character in a character set with a unique number, allowing computers to represent and manipulate text.
In the context of HTML and web development, character encoding is crucial because it ensures that the text content of web pages is displayed correctly across different browsers and systems. Without proper character encoding, characters may not appear as intended, especially if they are special or non-standard characters, such as accented letters or symbols from non-Latin alphabets.
The most common character encoding on the web today is UTF-8, a Unicode encoding that includes all the characters from all the writing systems of the world, as well as control characters and many other symbols. UTF-8 is backward compatible with ASCII, which was the original character encoding used in the early days of computing and the internet. ASCII could only represent 128 characters, which was sufficient for English but not for other languages.
HTML5 specifies UTF-8 as the default character encoding, which can be declared in an HTML document using the <meta charset="UTF-8"> tag within the <head> section of the HTML document. This declaration informs the browser to interpret the text content of the page as UTF-8 encoded text.
Character encoding is important not only for the proper display of text but also for the interoperability of ...
