People learning HTML often ask about the meta charset=“utf-8” tag. It’s an HTML tag that makes it possible for you to use emojis and other characters that aren’t covered in the traditional ASCII character set on your webpage. But how does it work and what does this tag mean?
What Does Meta Charset UTF-8 Do?
Meta charset=“utf-8” is an HTML tag that makes it possible to use emojis and other characters that aren’t in the traditional ASCII character set on your webpage. If you don’t use the tag, then you will need to look up HTML entities to manually insert an emoji or other character.
Let’s dig into this further.
What Is Meta Charset UTF 8?
Let’s start by breaking the meta charset=“utf-8” tag down.
Meta: This is an HTML tag that contains metadata about a webpage. The search engine uses this to determine the page content and how to treat a webpage.Charset: This is an attribute that tells your browser what character encoding to use for this webpage to show the content as desired.UTF-8: This is a version of the character set.
How Is Meta Charset UTF 8 Used?
Have you ever used emojis? Well, this meta tag is responsible for encoding these emojis into a machine-readable character and vice-versa. Most websites these days have to display characters that aren’t traditional ASCII characters. When receiving such characters from the HTML source, browsers need to be able to handle those to display properly. That’s what meta charset=“utf-8” does.
Why UTF-8?
It’s very unlikely that you’re not using it already. The UTF-8 character set covers all characters and symbols that exist in this universe. So, it only makes sense to use it to make your site be perceived as it is desired. You want to use an emoji or character, make your site look modern and graphical, UTF-8 to the rescue.
What If You Don’t Use Meta Charset UTF 8?
If you don’t use the tag, then you will have to look up HTML entities like &#xxx; to use that emoji or symbol and get it to display properly.
But it’s highly unlikely that you’re not already using it. !DOCTYPE html, by default, specifies UTF-8 as a character for encoding.
Well, now you might ask why is it written specifically, even after writing ‘DOCTYPE html’?
Many old browsers still don’t support HTML 5 even though it’s become a norm. So, it’s important to include this tag for those browsers.
