Character Encoding
The character encoding of a document refers to a technical specification of a standard character set, including letters, numbers, and symbols. The character set is specified as a <meta> element in the <head> of an XHTML document.
One of the most universal character sets—allowing for a wide range of international alphabets—is UTF-8. This is the recommended character set for most purposes. It is specified as follows:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
Other character sets include:
- ISO 8859-1 (Western European; this is the default in many English language web editors, including the English version of Dreamweaver)
- ISO 8859-2 (Central European)
- ISO 8859-9 (Turkish)
- ISO 8859-11 (Thai)
- ...and many others, specific to specific languages
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