From ASCII to UTF-8
ASCII was the first character encoding standard. ASCII defined 128 different characters that could be used on the internet: numbers (0-9), English letters (A-Z), and some special characters like ! $ + - ( ) @ < > .
ISO-8859-1 was the default character set for HTML 4. This character set supported 256 different character codes. HTML 4 also supported UTF-8.
ANSI (Windows-1252) was the original Windows character set. ANSI is identical to ISO-8859-1, except that ANSI has 32 extra characters.
The HTML5 specification encourages web developers to use the UTF-8 character set, which covers almost all of the characters and symbols in the world!
The HTML 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:
<meta charset="UTF-8">
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