The meta element

For HTML documents as well as XHTML documents served as text/html, the encoding should always be specified using a meta element in the head of the document. The http-equiv attribute passes information along to the user agent as though it appeared in the HTTP header. Again, the encoding is provided with the charset value as shown here:

<head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <title>Document Title</title>
</head>

Although the meta element declaring the content type is not a required element in the HTML and XHTML DTDs, it is strongly recommended for the purpose of clearly identifying the character encoding and keeping that information with the document. This is particularly helpful for common text editors (such as BBEdit), which use the meta element to identify the character encoding of the document when opening the document for editing. With this method, all character encodings must be explicitly specified, including UTF-8 and UTF-16.

Get Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial