---
title: ""
category: foundations
status: required
url: https://specification.website/spec/foundations/meta-charset/
updated: "2026-05-29"
sources:
- title: "HTML Living Standard — Specifying the document's character encoding"
url: "https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#charset"
publisher: "WHATWG"
- title: "MDN — : charset"
url: "https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/meta#charset"
publisher: "MDN"
- title: "WHATWG Encoding Standard"
url: "https://encoding.spec.whatwg.org/"
publisher: "WHATWG"
source_repo: https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website
licence: CC-BY-4.0
---
#
> Declare UTF-8 as the document character encoding in the first 1024 bytes of the HTML, so browsers parse text correctly before they hit any non-ASCII content.
## What it is
`` tells the browser how to decode the bytes of the HTML document into characters. In 2026 there is only one correct value:
```html
```
It must appear inside ``, and the entire `` element must fit within the **first 1024 bytes** of the response. Browsers stop sniffing after that point; anything declared later is ignored.
## Why it matters
Before the browser can parse a single character of your page, it has to decide which encoding to apply to the byte stream. Without an explicit declaration, it guesses — based on the `Content-Type` HTTP header, a byte-order mark, or heuristics over the first chunk of bytes. Guessing goes wrong:
- A page with a curly apostrophe (`'`) shows mojibake (`’`) when the browser picks Windows-1252.
- Form submissions get encoded in the wrong charset, corrupting non-ASCII input.
- Right-to-left text reorders incorrectly.
- Search engines index garbled strings.
**UTF-8 is the only encoding you should use.** It is a superset of ASCII, supports every script (Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, emoji), is the default for JSON and XML, and is what every modern build tool produces. Legacy encodings (`iso-8859-1`, `windows-1252`, `shift_jis`) exist only as compatibility for old documents — do not create new content in them.
## How to implement
Put the charset declaration as the very first child of ``, before `` or any other tag that could contain non-ASCII text:
```html
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<title>The Website Specification
...
```
Save the file itself as UTF-8 (most editors do this by default). The declaration in the HTML and the actual bytes on disk must match.
Also set the HTTP `Content-Type` header on the response. The header takes precedence over the meta tag, so if they conflict, the header wins:
```http
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
```
If both agree on UTF-8, you are covered for every loader: browsers, scrapers, RSS readers, and crawlers that read the bytes directly.
The older XHTML form `` still works but is verbose and unnecessary. Use the short form.
## Common mistakes
- Declaring the charset after `` so a non-ASCII character in the title is parsed wrongly before the meta tag is reached.
- Saving the file as Windows-1252 or Latin-1 while declaring `utf-8`.
- Adding a byte-order mark to a UTF-8 file. It is allowed but can break server-side includes and PHP headers.
- Different charsets in the HTTP header and the meta tag.
- Using `utf8` without the hyphen — browsers accept it, but `utf-8` is the canonical spelling.
## Verification
- View source. `<meta charset="utf-8" />` should be the first or second line inside `<head>`.
- Run `document.characterSet` in DevTools. It must return `"UTF-8"`.
- Check the `Content-Type` response header in the Network tab.
- Add a non-ASCII test string (`café — 日本語 — 🌍`) to a page and confirm it renders correctly.