meta charset utf-8 vs meta http-equiv Content-Type

Question

In order to define charset for HTML5 Doctype  which notation should I use    Short    lt meta charset  utf-8    gt    Long    lt meta http-equiv  Content-Type  content  text html  charset utf-8    gt

User · Answer

There is some news based on Mozilla Foundation  and sitepoint     Do not use this value  http-equiv content-type  as it is obsolete    Prefer the charset attribute on the  lt meta  element

User · Answer

Another reason to go with the short one is that it matches other instances where you might specify a character set in markup  For example    lt script type  javascript  charset  UTF-8  src   script js  gt  lt  script gt    lt p gt  lt a charset  UTF-8  href  http   example com   gt Example Site lt  a gt  lt  p gt    Consistency helps to reduce errors and make code more readable   Note that the charset attribute is case-insensitive  You can use UTF-8 or utf-8  however UTF-8 is clearer  more readable  more accurate   Also  there is absolutely no reason at all to use any value other than UTF-8 in the meta charset attribute or page header  UTF-8 is the default encoding for Web documents since HTML4 in 1999 and the only practical way to make modern Web pages   Also you should not use HTML entities in UTF-8  Characters like the copyright symbol should be typed directly  The only entities you should use are for the 5 reserved markup characters  less than  greater than  ampersand  prime  double prime  Entities need an HTML parser  which you may not always want to use going forward  they introduce errors  make your code less readable  increase your file sizes  and sometimes decode incorrectly in various browsers depending on which entities you used  Learn how to type insert copyright  trademark  open quote  close quote  apostrophe  em dash  en dash  bullet  Euro  and any other characters you encounter in your content  and use those actual characters in your code  The Mac has a Character Viewer that you can turn on in the Keyboard System Preference  and you can find and then drag and drop the characters you need  or use the matching Keyboard Viewer to see which keys to type  For example  trademark is Option 2  UTF-8 contains all of the characters and symbols from every written human language  So there is no excuse for using -- instead of an em dash  It is not a bad idea to learn the rules of punctuation and typography also     for example  knowing that a period goes inside a close quote  not outside      Using a  tag for something like content-type and encoding is highly   ironic  since without knowing those things  you couldn t parse the file    to get the value of the meta tag    No  that is not true  The browser starts out parsing the file as the browser s default encoding  either UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1  Since US-ASCII is a subset of both ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8  the browser can read  just fine either way     it is the same  When the browser encounters the meta charset tag  if the encoding is different than what the browser is already using  the browser reloads the page in the specified encoding  That is why we put the meta charset tag at the top  right after the head tag  before anything else  even the title  That way you can use UTF-8 characters in your title      You must save your file s  in UTF-8 encoding without BOM   That is not strictly true  If you only have US-ASCII characters in your document  you can Save it as US-ASCII and serve it as UTF-8  because it is a subset  But if there are Unicode characters  you are correct  you must Save as UTF-8 without BOM      If you want a good text editor that will save your files   in UTF-8  I recommend Notepad       On the Mac  use Bare Bones TextWrangler  free  from Mac App Store  or Bare Bones BBEdit which is at Mac App Store for  39 99     very cheap for such a great tool  In either app  there is a menu at the bottom of the document window where you specify the document encoding and you can easily choose  UTF-8 no BOM   And of course you can set that as the default for new documents in Preferences      But if your Webserver serves the encoding in the HTTP header    which is recommended  both  meta tags  are needless    That is incorrect  You should of course set the encoding in the HTTP header  but you should also set it in the meta charset attribute so that the page can be Saved by the user  out of the browser onto local storage and then Opened again later  in which case the only indication of the encoding that will be present is the meta charset attribute  You should also set a base tag for the same reason     on the server  the base tag is unnecessary  but when opened from local storage  the base tag enables the page to work as if it is on the server  with all the assets in place and so on  no broken links      AddDefaultCharset UTF-8   Or you can just change the encoding of particular file types like so   AddType text html charset utf-8 html   A tip for serving both UTF-8 and Latin-1  ISO-8859-1  files is to give the UTF-8 files a  text  extension and Latin-1 files  txt    AddType text plain charset iso-8859-1 txt AddType text plain charset utf-8 text   Finally  consider Saving your documents with Unix line endings  not legacy DOS or  classic  Mac line endings  which don t help and may hurt  especially down the line as we get further and further from those legacy systems  An HTML document with valid HTML5  UTF-8 encoding  and Unix line endings is a job well done  You can share and edit and store and read and recover and rely on that document in many contexts  It s lingua franca  It s digital paper

User · Answer

To embed a signature on an email  I would use the long version    lt meta http-equiv  Content-Type  content  text html  charset utf-8    gt    The reason is that not many email readers use html5  so it s always better use old html styles  Actually  it s better to use tables than divs   css as well

User · Answer

While not contesting the other answers  I think the following is worthy of mentioning    The    long     http-equiv  notation and the    short    one are equal  whichever comes first wins  Web server headers will override all the  lt meta gt  tags  BOM  Byte order mark  will override everything  and in many cases it will affect html 4  and probably other stuff  too   If you don t declare any encoding  you will probably get your text in    fallback text encoding    that is defined your browser  Neither in Firefox nor in Chrome it s utf-8  In absence of other clues the browser will attempt to read your document as if it was in ASCII to get the encoding  so you can t use any weird encodings  utf-16 with BOM should do  though   While the specs say that the encoding declaration must be within the first 512 bytes of the document  most browsers will try reading more than that    You can test by running echo  HTTP 1 1 200 OK r nContent-type  text html  charset windows-1251 r n r n xef xbb xbf lt  DOCTYPE html gt  lt html gt  lt head gt  lt meta http-equiv  Content-Type  content  text html  charset utf-8  gt  lt meta charset  windows-1251  gt  lt title gt        lt  title gt  lt  head gt  lt body gt        lt  body gt  lt  html gt     nc -lp 4500 and pointing your browser at localhost 4500   Of course you will want to change or remove parts  The BOM part is  xef xbb xbf  Be wary of the encoding of your shell    Please mind that it s very important that you explicitly declare the encoding  Letting browsers guess can lead to security issues

User · Answer

Both forms of the meta charset declaration are equivalent and should work the same across browsers  But  there are a few things you need to remember when declaring your web files character-set as UTF-8    Save your file s  in UTF-8 encoding without the byte-order mark  BOM   Declare the encoding in your HTML files using meta charset  like above   Your web server must serve your files  declaring the UTF-8 encoding in the Content-Type HTTP header    Apache servers are configured to serve files in ISO-8859-1 by default  so you need to add the following line to your  htaccess file   AddDefaultCharset UTF-8   This will configure Apache to serve your files declaring UTF-8 encoding in the Content-Type response header  but your files must be saved in UTF-8  without BOM  to begin with   Notepad cannot save your files in UTF-8 without the BOM  A free editor that can is Notepad    On the program menu bar  select  Encoding   Encode in UTF-8 without BOM   You can also open files and re-save them in UTF-8 using  Encoding   Convert to UTF-8 without BOM    More on the Byte Order Mark  BOM  at Wikipedia

User · Answer

In HTML5  they are equivalent  Use the shorter one  it is easier to remember and type  Browser support is fine since it was designed for backwards compatibility

User · Answer

lt meta charset  utf-8  gt  was introduced with for HTML5   As mentioned in the documentation  both are valid  However   lt meta charset  utf-8  gt  is only for HTML5  and easier to type remember     In due time  the old style is bound to become deprecated in the near future  I d stick to the new  lt meta charset  utf-8  gt   There s only one way  but up  In tech s case  that s phasing out the old  really  REALLY fast   Documentation  HTML meta charset Attribute   W3Schools

User · Answer

Use  lt meta charset  utf-8    gt  for web browsers when using HTML5   Use  lt meta http-equiv  Content-Type  content  text html  charset utf-8    gt  when using HTML4 or XHTML  or for outdated dom parsers  like DOMDocument in php 5 3

User · Answer

I would recommend doing it like this to keep things in line with HTML5   lt meta charset  quot UTF-8 quot  gt   EG   lt  DOCTYPE html gt   lt html lang  quot en quot  gt   lt head gt       lt meta charset  quot UTF-8 quot  gt       lt meta name  quot viewport quot  content  quot width device-width  initial-scale 1 0 quot  gt       lt title gt Document lt  title gt   lt  head gt   lt body gt   lt  body gt   lt  html gt

[html] <meta charset="utf-8"> vs <meta http-equiv="Content-Type">

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