Character encoding: Character encoding and the Web

Why specifying a character set is important

Methods for indicating the character set

• Indicating the character set by means of an HTTP Content-type header
  The Content-type header can be used to indicate a character set for the document to be sent by the server.
• Indicating the character set by means of a meta element
  Web developers can also apply a meta element in the HTML source code to indicate the character set of a page.

Guidelines for indicating the character set

Web developers should always specify the character set in their pages.

Which character set is suitable?

• The ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) character set
  
• The UTF-8 character set
  The UTF-8 character set has the most extensive repertoire and combines most character sets (Western and Eastern scripts, and symbols) into a single set. Web developers are advised to specify the UTF-8 character set.

Character encoding and fonts

Character encoding is sometimes – incorrectly – associated with fonts.

Special characters, forms and databases