Declaring The XHTML File Encoding

XHTML files, along with any other text files, are saved using a particular character encoding. Since there are many different character encoding in the world, and you have no idea what your visitor's browser default settings are, it's always a good idea to explicitly declare which encoding you used to make your Web page. Here's an example of how to declare the character encoding, in this case, the Unicode encoding is used:

Code Sample:

<head>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>    
</head>

Now, when a browser sees this <meta> tag, it will know that the page was encoded using UTF-8, and will display properly (provided that you really did encode the page in UTF-8). XHTML requires that you declare the encoding if it is anything other then the default UTF-8 or UTF-16 encodings. You can also use the XML Declaration to specify character encodings.

International Character Set Codes

A note on XHTML Internationalization

Internationalization, the process of making a Web site available in different languages for the global Internet community is sometimes refered to in short hand as simply: i18n - the 18 corresponds to the 18 characters in between the starting "I" and the ending "n" in the word "Internationalization".

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) highly recommends the use of UTF-8 wherever possible - UTF-8 can be used for all languages and is the recommended charset on the Internet. Support for it is rapidly increasing. That being said, here is a partial listing of languages, countries, and the older charsets typically used for them:

Language (country)	Charset
Afrikaans (AF)	iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Albanian (SQ)	iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Arabic (AR)	iso-8859-6
Basque (EU)	iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Bulgarian (BG)	iso-8859-5
Byelorussian (BE)	iso-8859-5
Catalan (CA)	iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Croatian (HR)	iso-8859-2, windows-1250
Czech (CS)	iso-8859-2
Danish (DA)	iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Dutch (NL)	iso-8859-1, windows-1252
English (EN)	iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Esperanto (EO)	iso-8859-3*
Estonian (ET)	iso-8859-15
Faroese (FO)	iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Finnish (FI)	iso-8859-1, windows-1252
French (FR)	iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Galician (GL)	iso-8859-1, windows-1252
German (DE)	iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Greek (EL)	iso-8859-7
Hebrew (IW)	iso-8859-8
Hungarian (HU)	iso-8859-2
Icelandic (IS)	iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Inuit (Eskimo) languages	iso-8859-10*
Irish (GA)	iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Italian (IT)	iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Japanese (JA)	shift_jis, iso-2022-jp, euc-jp
Korean (KO)	euc-kr
Lapp	iso-8859-10* **
Latvian (LV)	iso-8859-13, windows-1257
Lithuanian (LT)	iso-8859-13, windows-1257
Macedonian (MK)	iso-8859-5, windows-1251
Maltese (MT)	iso-8859-3*
Norwegian (NO)	iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Polish (PL)	iso-8859-2
Portuguese (PT)	iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Romanian (RO)	iso-8859-2
Russian (RU)	koi8-r, iso-8859-5
Scottish (GD)	iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Serbian (SR) cyrillic	windows-1251, iso-8859-5***
Serbian (SR) latin	iso-8859-2, windows-1250
Slovak (SK)	iso-8859-2
Slovenian (SL)	iso-8859-2, windows-1250
Spanish (ES)	iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Swedish (SV)	iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Turkish (TR)	iso-8859-9, windows-1254
Ukrainian (UK)	iso-8859-5

* = scarce support in browsers.
** = Lapp doesn't have a 2-letter code, a three letter code (lap) is proposed in NISO Z39.53.
*** = Serbian can be written in Latin (most commonly used) and Cyrillic (mostly windows-1251).

Web Technologies

Declaring The XHTML File Encoding

International Character Set Codes

A note on XHTML Internationalization