Interactive online courses HTML Academy
2026-03-09 14:09 Diff
https://htmlacademy.org/courses/html-css-basics/html-document-structure/meta-encoding-tag

Great job! We‘ve finished marking up the content. Now, let’s return to the <head> tag.

Notice inside the <head> is a <meta> tag. This is a single tag. In other words, it does not require a paired closing tag at the end.

You can use <meta> to transmit various metadata (or meta information) to the browser, search engine bot or other device about your site, including the character encoding, content description and so on. To do this, <meta> tags with various attributes and values are used. Here are some of the attributes: charset, content, http-equiv, name and scheme.

You can use the charset attribute to specify the character encoding for the HTML webpage:

<meta charset="name of character encoding">

It is always best to specify the character encoding explicitly. If you don’t do this, the browser may incorrectly guess it, which will result in a bunch of hieroglyphs being displayed instead of your intended text.

The most widely used encoding in current use is utf-8. You should use it in all of your projects. Previously the windows-1251 encoding was widely used, as it was the standard encoding for Cyrillic in Windows. However, now this is considered to be bad practice.

<meta>, <link>, <title> and other tags that are included in <head> contain a special type of content — metadata. This metadata is not displayed on the page directly, but rather it is used to store information about the document and to connect the document to other documents and systems.