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General Discussion

Tristen Vukelich
Tristen Vukelich
1,141 Points

<meta charset="utf-8"> ???

Hey guys and gals. I'm a bit confused on the purpose of character sets, any knowledge out there?

2 Answers

David Morisset
David Morisset
13,323 Points

It does specify the character encoding that will be used on the page. Character encoding is what is used to transform characters on the page into bytes. In this case, it is using unicode. If your purpose is to write html, the only thing you have to know is that

<meta charset="utf-8">

is compulsory.

If you want to go in-depth in the subject, here is what the mozilla developer network has to say about charset, and the wikipedia page on utf-8.