HTML Encoding (Character Sets)
HTML encoding, also known as character encoding, is a way to represent characters in HTML documents. It is essential for ensuring that characters are displayed correctly across different devices and browsers. HTML encoding is particularly important when dealing with special characters, such as those outside the ASCII character set.
The two main components related to HTML encoding are:
Character Sets:
- ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange):This is the basic character set that includes standard English letters, numbers, and symbols. It uses 7 bits to represent each character.
- English letters (A-Z)
- Numbers (0-9)
- Special characters like ! $ + - ( ) @ < >.
- Unicode: Unicode is a character encoding standard that includes a vast range of characters from different languages and symbol sets. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are two common encoding schemes within Unicode.
HTML Entities:
- HTML entities are codes used to represent characters that have a special meaning in HTML or characters that are not easily typable on a keyboard.
- For example, the less-than sign < has a special meaning in HTML, so if you want to display it on a web page without it being interpreted as the beginning of an HTML tag, you use the HTML entity <.
Here are some commonly used HTML entities for special characters:
- < for < (less than)
- > for > (greater than)
- & for & (ampersand)
- " for " (double quote)
- ' for ' (apostrophe/single quote)
When working with HTML, it's crucial to specify the character set in the document to ensure proper rendering. The <meta> tag with the charset attribute is typically used in the <head> section of an HTML document to declare the character set. For example:
Example
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Your Page Title</title>
</head>
<body>
<!-- Your HTML content goes here -->
</body>
</html>