Indicating character encoding (fallbacks)


Difficult to tell the server about the character encoding of a document

'Self-identifying' document:

HTML:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
Goes inside HTML <head>
XML:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16BE"?>
At the very start; UTF-8 by default
CSS:
@charset "UTF-8";

Additional mechanism in HTML:

'charset' attribute on links (<a> and <link>):
<a href=... charset="UTF-8">...</a>
Useful in bookmark list