Document Character Encoding Document Character Encoding
Document Character Encoding Tutorial and Information







Choosing Document Character Encoding

The document character encoding or document char-set is located in the head section of a web page or HTML document. The document character encoding meta tag informs the user agent or web browser about the character encoding of the HTML document.
Here is an example for document character encoding: 
<head>
	<title>My Web Site Title</title>
	<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
</head>

Authoring tools (e.g., text editors) may encode HTML documents in the character encoding of their choice, and the choice largely depends on the conventions used by the system software. These tools may employ any convenient encoding that covers most of the characters contained in the document, provided the encoding is correctly labeled. Occasional characters that fall outside this encoding may still be represented by character references. These always refer to the document character set, not the character encoding.

Servers and proxies may change a character encoding (called transcoding) on the fly to meet the requests of user agents (see section 14.2 of [RFC2616], the "Accept-Charset" HTTP request header). Servers and proxies do not have to serve a document in a character encoding that covers the entire document character set.

Commonly used character encoding on the Web include ISO-8859-1 (also referred to as "Latin-1"; usable for most Western European languages), ISO-8859-5 (which supports Cyrillic), SHIFT_JIS (a Japanese encoding), EUC-JP (another Japanese encoding), and UTF-8 (an encoding of ISO 10646 using a different number of bytes for different characters). Names for character encoding are case-insensitive, so that for example "SHIFT_JIS", "Shift_JIS", and "shift_jis" are equivalent.

This specification does not mandate which character encoding a user agent must support.

Conforming user agents must correctly map to ISO 10646 all characters in any character encoding that they recognize (or they must behave as if they did).

For more detailed information in regards to document character encoding please visit W3C's HTML Document Representation.

Visit HTML Code for more information about character encoding before continuing on to HTML tags.



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