Choosing an encoding
The W3C recommends the UTF-8 encoding for all (X)HTML and XML documents because it can accommodate the greatest number of characters and is well supported by servers. It allows wide-ranging languages to be mixed within a single document.
Not all web documents need to be encoded using UTF-8 however. If you are authoring a document in a language that uses a lot of non-ASCII characters, you may want to choose an encoding that minimizes the need to numerically represent (“escape”) these special characters.
Bear in mind, however, that regardless of the encoding, all characters in the document will be interpreted relative to Unicode code points.
Tip
For more information on how character sets and character encodings should be handled for web documents, see the W3C’s Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0 Recommendation at http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod/.
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