The meta element

• Tells the browser how it should display the webpage
• Can also give info to search engines about the content of the website (author, description, keywords etc.)
• charset = character set
• In the above case, we're telling the browser that the text inside the webpage is encoded using the UTF-8 system
• UTF-8 is the standard when working with HTML5. Basically a list of all the available characters that we can use for it to be rendered correctly.

Unicode and character sets

• Good old unaccented English letters = ASCII
• Represented every character using a number between 32-127. Space was 32, “A” was 65, etc.
• Codes below 32 were used for control characters, e.g., 7 made your computer beep
• Could be stored in 7 bits (computers in those days were using 8-bit bytes)


• Eventually came the ANSI standard (everyone agreed on 👆ASCII, but differed from 128 up)
• The different systems were called code pages (e.g. Israel used CP 00862, while Arabic used CP 00864)


• Then there came Unicode
• A brave effort to include every reasonable writing system on the planet
• Every platonic (first principle) letter in every alphabet is assigned a number by the Unicode consortium, written: U+0639. This is called a code point. U+ => “Unicode” and the numbers were hexadecimal (using base 16 instead of the normal base 10)

There were arguments over how to store these code points.

There are over a hundred encodings and above code point 127, all bets are off.

UTF-8 is a method of storing (encoding) unicode code points.