What is charset in HTML?

Question

What is charset in the meta tag in HTML? Also, what is utf-8 or utf-16? what purpose does it serve?

Answer 1

if you now tel me too😅

Answer 2

Back about 20 years ago, we need to declare charset because different language has different charset. We needed to declare what language our webpage is in for browsers of that time (Netscape Netvigator, IE, etc.) to know which rules show content of the page. For example, BIG5 for traditional Chinese.

After Unicode is implemented, now we only need Unicode.

MDN meta charset:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/meta

Quote :
`The HTML specification recommends the use of the UTF-8 encoding (which can represent all of Unicode)`

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/Localizations_and_character_encodings

Answer 3

https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_charset.asp

Answer 4

ASCII was the first Character Encoding Standard which is also called character set. It defined 128 different alphanumeric characters i.e. numbers (0 - 9), letters (A - Z ), and some special characters like !
$ + - ( ) @ < > / + & # € ℅ etc.

Answer 5

"Utf-8" & "Utf-16" are charset which are specified in the <meta> tag

Example : <meta char= "utf-8">