What is character encoding?

Question

What do you mean that UTF8 is the default character encoding for html5?
And can the character encoding be changed because UTF-8 is just default for html5?

Answer 1

At this point I think we can say that character encodings other than UTF-8 are a thing of the past. At least on the web.

Basically a computer can only deal with numbers, and humans can only deal with text, and so we need a way to translate letters into numbers. You can imagine a character encoding as a big spreadsheet where each letter gets assigned a number, for example in utf-8 the letter `a` is 97. And then the computer can send these numbers to another computer which translates it back to text.

I am simplifying of course.

Historically, different character encodings could only deal with latin text, or chinese text, or japanese text etc. So if a chinese guy opened a document you wrote, they would see chinese gibberish, because you and the chinese guy use different spreadsheets to translate letters into numbers.

unicode/utf-8 aims to be able to deal with any language ever spoken and it is the global standard today. Which is why I can do this: தமிழ்hello小的汽车ψωμιש🤓ანბ