Character and Text Encoding on the Web
To a computer, a character is nothing more than a bit of code that it recognizes to display a particular glyph on a screen (or print, or other output media). The shapes of letters, numbers, and other symbols are meaningless to the computer; it only know the code to display a particular glyph so that humans can understand it.
Character encoding or font encoding is a system that pairs each character in a given font with the computer code needed to display it. On the flip side, with text encoding, all of the text in any document is encoded by the computer, each letter having its own unique code “number.”
There are a number of different standards that can be used to encode a computer file such as a font or ...
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