The encoding of an HTML page is important information for a browser and an Internet application. You can think of the page encoding as the character set used for the locale that an Internet application is serving. The browser needs to know about the page encoding so that it can use the correct fonts and character set mapping tables to display the HTML pages. Internet applications need to know about the HTML page encoding so they can process input data from an HTML form.
Instead of using different native encodings for the different locales, it is recommended that UTF-8 (Unicode encoding) is used for all page encodings. Using the UTF-8 encoding not only simplifies the coding for global applications, but it allows for multilingual content on a single page.
This section includes the following topics: