Charset
Character Encoding
To display an HTML page correctly, a web browser must know the character set (character encoding) to use.
ASCII was the first character encoding standard (also called character set). 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 set. It supported 256 different character codes.
ISO-8859-1 was the default character set 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.
Differences between character sets
HTML charset Attribute
This is specified in the <meta> tag:
HTML4
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1">
HTML5
<meta charset="UTF-8">
ASCII
ASCII uses the values from 0 to 31 (and 127) for control characters.
ASCII uses the values from 32 to 126 for letters, digits, and symbols.
ASCII does not use the values from 128 to 255.
ANSI(Windows-1252)
ANSI is identical to ASCII for the values from 0 to 127.
ANSI has a proprietary set of characters for the values from 128 to 159.
ANSI is identical to UTF-8 for the values from 160 to 255.
ISO-8859-1
8859-1 is identical to ASCII for the values from 0 to 127.
8859-1 does not use the values from 128 to 159.
8859-1 is identical to UTF-8 for the values from 160 to 255.
UTF-8
UTF-8 is identical to ASCII for the values from 0 to 127.
UTF-8 does not use the values from 128 to 159.
UTF-8 is identical to both ANSI and 8859-1 for the values from 160 to 255.
UTF-8 continues from the value 256 with more than 10 000 different characters.