What is character encoding in html?

Question

What is character encoding and what does utf-8 means?

Answer 1

Character encoding is a way of representing non-ASCII characters (often local diactric letters or non-Latin alphabet). UTF-8 is one of the standards of doing this, a default and most popular in majority of programming languages and Web. It stands for Unicode Transformation Format (8-bit), as it uses 8 bits for representing a character.