Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Specifying Character Encoding

The W3C encourages authors to specify the character encoding for all web documents, even those that use the default UTF-8 Unicode encoding, but it is particularly critical if an alternate encoding is used. There are several ways to declare the character encoding for documents: in the HTTP header delivered by the server, in the XML declaration (for XHTML and XML documents only), or in a meta element in the head of the document. This section looks at each method and provides guidelines for their use.