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HTML Charset

HTML Charset is also called HTML Character Sets or HTML Encoding. It is used to display an HTML page properly and correctly because for displaying anything correctly, a web browser must know which character set (character encoding) to use.

HTML Character Encoding

In HTML, the first ever character encoding standard is ASCII standard. ASCII provides 128 different alphanumeric characters that could be used on the internet: numbers (0-9), English letters (A-Z), and some special characters like! $ + - ( ) @ <> .


UTF-8 is a variable width character encoding which covers almost all of the characters and symbols in the world. ANSI (Windows-1252) was the original Windows character set, which supported 256 different character codes.

ISO-8859-1 was the default character set for HTML 4. This character set also supported 256 different character codes.

Why UTF 8 is also supported in HTML4?

Because ANSI and ISO-8859-1 were so limited, HTML 4 also supported UTF-8.The default character encoding for HTML5 is UTF-8.

UTF-8 syntax for HTML4:

UTF-8 syntax for HTML5:

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