I need help understanding what meta charset does in html

Question

web development

Answer 1

for pure english, it's ok without this decl
for sites with, say chinese, because there are simplified chinese and tradition chinese, if you don't declare the charset, the browser will give you some unreadable codes.
and, hth is right, utf8 is most commonly used because its universal and almost all language can be displayed correctly

Answer 2

so is it for like language translation on the web?

Answer 3

kind of, but the data already in correct language, so not translation actually
it's for the visitor of a website,
for their browsers to know follow which rules to find the characters to display for each code.

Answer 4

oh ok

Answer 5

there is an option called "encoding" in view in browsers, the different encoding are all the rules (charset), in the past (about 20 years ago), without meta data, if you encounter foreign language , you need to choose that manually