What is Character Encoding?
ASCII was the first character encoding standard (also called character set). ASCII defined 128 different alphanumeric characters that could be used on the internet: numbers (0-9), English letters (A-Z), and some special characters like ! $ + - ( ) @ < > .
ANSI (Windows-1252) was the original Windows character set, with support for 256 different character codes.
ISO-8859-1 was the default character set for HTML 4. This character set also supported 256 different character codes.
Because ANSI and ISO-8859-1 were so limited, HTML 4 also supported UTF-8.
Note: UTF-8 (Unicode) covers almost all of the characters and symbols in the world.
Note: The default character encoding for HTML5 is UTF-8.
charset Attribute
To display an HTML page correctly, a web browser must know the character set used in the page.
This is specified in the <meta> tag.
For HMTL4:
For HMTL5:
The ASCII Character Set
ASCII uses the values from 0 to 31 (and 127) for control characters.
ASCII uses the values from 32 to 126 for letters, digits, and symbols.
ASCII does not use the values from 128 to 255.
The ANSI Character Set
ANSI is identical to ASCII for the values from 0 to 127.
ANSI has a proprietary set of characters for the values from 128 to 159.
ANSI is identical to UTF-8 for the values from 160 to 255.
The ISO-8859-1 Character Set
8859-1 is identical to ASCII for the values from 0 to 127.
8859-1 does not use the values from 128 to 159.
8859-1 is identical to UTF-8 for the values from 160 to 255.
The UTF-8 Character Set
UTF-8 is identical to ASCII for the values from 0 to 127.
UTF-8 does not use the values from 128 to 159.
UTF-8 is identical to both ANSI and 8859-1 for the values from 160 to 255.
UTF-8 continues from the value 256 with more than 10 000 different characters.