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HTML How to Make a Website HTML First Use HTML Elements

Character set- html

Hey guys, I would be so grateful if you explained this as simply as possible as I am only 13. Thanks xxx Another question would be would it matter if I spelt colour like colour, instead of the american spelling color? Or does html and CSS base it self around american spellings?

index.html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head> <meta charset= "UTF-8"> </head>
  <body></body>
</html>

4 Answers

Hi Michelle,

'charset' is the set of characters the can be used in your page, such as numbers (0-9), English letters (A-Z), and some special characters like ! $ + - ( ) @ < > .

UTF-8 (Unicode) covers almost all of the characters and symbols in the world, so this has become the standard 'charset' in HTML5.

As far as your question regarding color/colour, HTML and CSS do not recognize colour as an accessible property.

Hope this helps with your understanding on these matters!

Keep coding! Taylor

hey, well to explain to you plainly your first question ,is that in order to display an HTML page correctly, a web browser must know the character set (character encoding) to use.

What is Character Encoding ?

ASCII was the first character encoding standard. It defines 127 different alphanumeric characters that could be used on the internet.

ASCII supported numbers (0-9), English letters (A-Z), and some special characters like ! $ + - ( ) @ < > .

ANSI (Windows-1252) was the original Windows character encoding. It supported 256 different character codes.

ISO-8859-1 was the default character encoding for HTML 4. It also supported 256 different character codes.

Because ANSI and ISO were limited, the default character encoding was changed to UTF-8 in HTML5.

UTF-8 (Unicode) covers almost all of the characters and symbols in the world.


for your second question, you have to respect HTML language as it is, if you change one letter, the browser wouldn't recognize it.

I hope this answers could help

w3schools for the win! :)

yap she wanted it the most simple possible, so I know they re better at doing that :), so no harm in using a source ;), its more detailed and more clear :)

Thanks :)

Is the placing of my meta tag wrong?