Select an encoding that maximizes the opportunity to directly represent characters and minimizes the need to represent characters by using character escapes.

Where you have a choice for a particular language, script, or group of languages, select the most commonly supported encoding, and check that user agents adequately support the encoding selected.

Consider a solution that minimizes complexity when dealing with multiple languages and scripts.

(Note that support for a given encoding (especially Unicode) does not necessarily imply that a user agent will correctly display the text. Numerous scripts, such as Arabic and Indic, require additional rules to transform the character sequence in memory to an appropriate sequence of font glyphs for display.)