Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

HTML

Posted by Mark Brady
Mark Brady
6,239 Points

<meta charset="utf-8" /> and <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />

What does these mean? When and why do we use these codes?

I struggle if I don't know the why behind something.

Thanks for the help!

1 Answer

Bryan Peters
Bryan Peters
11,996 Points

To display an HTML page correctly, a web browser must know the character set used in the page.

This line tells the browser that you are using the UTF-8 character set.

You can view differences between common character sets here

The viewport meta is used to control layout on mobile browsers, more info here.