Why We Need Meta charset utf-8 tag?

Posted in Tutorials

In the basic HTML5 page explained here, we have an meta utf-8 tag …

This tag tells the browser to render using the UTF-8 character set?  UTF-8 is capable of encoding all possible characters in Unicode.

Why does this matter?  It matters if you have any international characters in your HTML.   In our above example, we have an Spanish phrase with the tilda n character.   When shown in the browser with the meta charset=”utf-8″, it looks as expected like this …

But without the meta charset=”utf-8″ tag, it renders incorrectly…

Even if you do not have any international characters right now in your documents, you should still put the meta charset=”utf-8″ tag in case you have in the future.

 

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