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The meta tag, which is used for page character encoding

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.

index.html

HTML

<!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="windows-1251"> <title>The website of a beginning coder</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="outlines.css"> </head> <body> <header> <h1>The website of a beginning coder</h1> </header> <main> <nav> Navigation </nav> <section> <p>Greetings to everyone! Welcome to my first site. Up until just recently I had no idea what a coder does for a living, but now I have found interactive courses in HTML and CSS and I have set myself the goal of becoming one. I even was assigned an instructor, Muffin, who does not allow me to slack off and will track my progress.</p> <p>My first assignment is to keep a diary and honestly write about all of my accomplishments.</p> </section> <section> Skills section </section> </main> <footer> Website footer </footer> </body> </html>

Goalscompleted

Change the webpage character encoding from windows-1251 to utf-8 inside the <head> meta tag.

The meta tag, which is used for page character encoding

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