CODEWITHSUNDEEP
html
Rahul Dhrub
Rahul Dhrub

Reputation: 81

Can we use "UTF-16" in meta tag in HTML?

Will it behave differently from the use of UTF-8 in Meta tag in HTML code?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 8016

Answers (1)

Rounin
Rounin

Reputation: 29493

UTF-16 is incompatible with ASCII.

Consequently, w3.org says:

Working with UTF-16

According to the results of a Google sample of several billion pages, less than 0.01% of pages on the Web are encoded in UTF-16. UTF-8 accounted for over 80% of all Web pages, if you include its subset, ASCII, and over 60% if you don't. You are strongly discouraged from using UTF-16 as your page encoding.

If, for some reason, you have no choice, here are some rules for declaring the encoding. They are different from those for other encodings.

The HTML5 specification forbids the use of the meta element to declare UTF-16, because the values must be ASCII-compatible. Instead you should ensure that you always have a byte-order mark at the very start of a UTF-16 encoded file. In effect, this is the in-document declaration.

Furthermore, if your page is encoded as UTF-16, do not declare your file to be "UTF-16BE" or "UTF-16LE", use "UTF-16" only. The byte-order mark at the beginning of your file will indicate whether the encoding scheme is little-endian or big-endian. (This is because content explicitly encoded as, say, UTF-16BE should not use a byte-order mark; but HTML5 requires a byte-order mark for UTF-16 encoded pages.)

(My bold).

Source: https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-html-encoding-declarations

Upvotes: 7

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