HTML Charsets

The web browser displays the numbers, alphabets, and some other symbols correctly. This is all possible because of the required character set that the web browser uses. The character set or character encoding has different character encoding standards which assign some numbers to these character sets that can be used on the internet.

ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ANSII) designed this character encoding .It standard for electronic communication . This Encoding are used in C/C++ programming. It has 128 alphanumeric characters including alphabets(A-Z) and (a-z) and some special symbols like + – * / ( ) @ etc

ANSI(Windows-1252):

American National Standards Institute (ANSI) created character encoding. This character encoding supports 256 characters and it is the default character set in Microsoft Windows.

ISO-8859-1

It is used as the default character set of HTML4. It also represents 256 characters. If you create a text file in this encoding and try to copy/paste some Chinese characters, you will see weird results. So in other words, don't use it. Unicode has taken over the world and UTF-8 is pretty much the standard these days

UTF-8

UTF-8 and UTF-16 standards were developed by Unicode Consortium because the ISO-8859 character-sets are limited, and not compatible with a multilingual environment. It consists of all the character and punctuation symbols.

For Displaying HTML webpage correctly, you must have to tell the browser which character-set (encoding) to use:

<meta charset="UTF-8">Less than

For HTML5, the By default character encoding is UTF-8. The character encoding for the early web was ASCII.

For using different character encoding from UTF-8 can be specified in the <meta> tag:

<meta charset="ISO-8859-1">