HTML5 has a brand new attribute, charset which makes the declaration cleaner and simpler than the old method. In the past (HTML 4.01) we would have written:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
Now in HTML5 we write:
<meta charset="UTF-8">
How easy is that? Additional stuff you might want to know:
- UTF-8 - Specifies character encoding for Unicode. This should be your default encoding type unless you have some specific need to have another encoding type e.g. to specify another character set.
- Metadata is used to provide information about the HTML document. It is not displayed on the page, but is able to be interpreted or parsed by browsers or search engines.
- <meta> tags always go inside the <head> element. The encoding needs to be within the first 1024 bytes of the document, so place it immediately inside the <head> tag.
- An alternative to the meta charset element is to use a Unicode Byte Order Mark (BOM) character at the start of the file. I do not recommend this system over the <meta> method.
You should also specify the encoding type in your external CSS documents! When I read this I had a really? moment. I hadn't known that. Now I do - and so do you.
Like the HTML5 spec above, the encoding for CSS documents should appear at the very start of the document. Here's how to write the encoding:
@charset "UTF-8";This declaration tells the browser to read the following CSS file as UTF-8. Easy.
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