"Charset": Character Sets

Information about the character set used in a web page tells the browser what type of letters, numbers, and other symbols to display. The information about the character set, or charset for short, is provided within the head tags of web pages.

As more languages, and therefore different sets of characters, are used to communicate on the web, it's increasingly important for character information to be included in the web page. In XHTML, the information is required.

The charset information for this page is:

The information"utf-8" indicates that the page uses unicode, which is a system in which all characters from all character sets are included. Additional information in the document declaration (//EN) indicates that the language for the page is English. Browsers use the combination of information to choose the appropriate characters for English from the unicode system.

Other charsets are also common, particularly ISO standards as included in the meta tag below:

The information above is from a transitional HTML page, not an XHTML page. One way you can tell is " />" that closes the meta element expression.