HTML Encoding, also known as character encoding, is the process of representing text in a format that can be safely transmitted and displayed in web browsers. This is necessary because different computers and software use different character sets or encoding standards to represent characters.
There are various character encoding standards, but the most commonly used in HTML are:
- ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange): It is a 7-bit character set used to represent English characters and symbols. ASCII characters can be used directly in HTML documents.
- Unicode: It is a character encoding standard that supports almost all languages and scripts in the world. Unicode includes a large number of characters, and the most commonly used encoding format for Unicode is UTF-8.
UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding standard, which means that it uses 1 to 4 bytes to represent each character. The ASCII characters are represented using a single byte in UTF-8, while non-ASCII characters require two to four bytes.
To specify the character encoding of an HTML document, you can use the meta tag in the head section of the HTML document. For example, to specify that the document is encoded in UTF-8, you can use the following meta tag:
<meta charset="utf-8">
It is important to use the correct character encoding for your HTML documents to ensure that all characters are displayed correctly in web browsers.
