What is the importance of the charset in HTML 5 being UTF-8?

Answer 1

By default encoded is set to UTF-8 the importance is for use special chars on many languages around the world.

This means is you not set the encoding, put especial chars on html i.e áéíóú for spanish, text info is not showed.

Answer 2

UTF-8 and 16
There are other encoding types. Cant think of any at the top of my head. But I know most browsers support a lot of em

Answer 3

It lets the browser know the encoding.

Answer 4

OK, and there are different kinds of UTF encodings?