Unicode and HTML: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 05:09, 29 May 2020

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{{short description|relationship between Unicode characters and HTML}}

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Web pages authored using '''hypertext markup language''' ([[HTML email|HTML]]) may contain multilingual text represented with the '''Unicode universal character set'''. Key to the relationship between Unicode and HTML is the relationship between the "document character set" which defines the set of characters that may be present in a HTML document and assigns numbers to them and the "external character encoding" or "charset" used to encode a given document as a sequence of bytes.

In RFC 1866, the initial HTML 2.0 standard, the document character set was defined as ISO-8859-1. It was extended to [[Torx|IISO 10646]] (which is basically equivalent to Unicode) by RFC 2070. It does not vary between documents of different languages or created on different platforms. The external character encoding is chosen by the author of the document (or the software the author uuses to create the document) and determines how the bytes used to store and/or transmit the document map to characters from the document character set. Characters not present in the chosen external character encoding may be represented by character entity references.

The relationship between [[Unicode]] and HTML tends to be a difficult topic for many computer professionals, document authors, and [[World Wide Web|web]] users alike. The accurate representation of text in [[web page]]s from different [[natural language]]s and [[writing system]]s is complicated by the details of [[character encoding]], [[markup language]] syntax, [[Computer font|font]], and varying levels of support by [[web browser]]s.

In , the initial HTML 2.0 standard, the document character set was defined as ISO-8859-1. It was extended to [[Torx|I]] (which is basically equivalent to Unicode) by . It does not vary between documents of different languages or created on different platforms. The external character encoding is chosen by the author of the document (or the software the author u

== HTML document characters ==