HTML Unicode（UTF-8）Reference Manual
Unicode Consortium
The Unicode Consortium developed the Unicode Standard. Their goal is to replace existing character sets with the standard Unicode Transformation Format (UTF, short for Unicode Transformation Format).
The Unicode Standard is a successful initiative, implemented in HTML, XML, Java, JavaScript, E-mail, ASP, and PHP. It is also supported by many operating systems and all modern browsers.
The Unicode Consortium cooperates with leading standards development organizations, including ISO, W3C, and ECMA.
Unicode Character Set
Unicode can be implemented by different character sets. The most commonly used encodings are UTF-8 and UTF-16:
| Character Set | Description |
|---|---|
| UTF-8 | Characters in UTF-8 can be 1 to 4 bytes long. UTF-8 can represent any character in the Unicode Standard. UTF-8 is backward compatible with ASCII. UTF-8 is the preferred encoding for e-mail and web pages. |
| UTF-16 | 16-bit Unicode Transformation Format is a variable-length Unicode character encoding capable of encoding the entire Unicode repertoire. UTF-16 is mainly used in operating systems and environments such as Microsoft Windows, Java, and .NET. |
Tip:The first 128 characters of Unicode (corresponding one-to-one with ASCII) are encoded using an octet with the same binary value as ASCII, making valid ASCII text also valid when encoded as UTF-8.
Tip:All HTML 4 processors support UTF-8, and all HTML 5 and XML processors support UTF-8 and UTF-16!
HTML5 Standard: Unicode UTF-8
Because the character set size in ISO-8859 is limited and incompatible in multilingual environments, the Unicode Consortium developed the Unicode Standard.
The Unicode Standard covers (almost) all characters, punctuation marks, and symbols.
Unicode makes text processing, storage, and transport independent of platform and language.
The default character encoding in HTML-5 is UTF-8.
The following lists some UTF-8 character sets supported by HTML5:
| Character Set | Decimal | Hexadecimal |
|---|---|---|
| C0 Controls and Basic Latin | 0-127 | 0000-007F |
| C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement | 128-255 | 0080-00FF |
| Latin Extended-A | 256-383 | 0100-017F |
| Latin Extended-B | 384-591 | 0180-024F |
If an HTML5 webpage uses a character set different from UTF-8, it needs to be specified in the <meta> tag, as follows:
Examples
Other Extensions