In order to support all Unicode characters without resorting to numeric character references, a web page must have an encoding supportingcovering all of Unicode. The most popular is [[UTF-8]], where the [[ASCII]] characters, such as English letters, digits, and some other common characters are preserved unchanged against ASCII. This makes HTML code (such as <br> and </div>) unchanged compared to ASCII. Characters outside the ASCII range are stored in 2-4 bytes. It is also possible to use [[UTF-16]] where most characters are stored as two bytes with varying [[endianness]], which is supported by modern browsers but less commonly used. It is also possible to use a one-byte-per-character encoding and use numeric character references (see below) but this is less common.
