<meta charset="utf-8"> vs <meta http-equiv="Content-Type">

Question

In order to define charset for HTML5 Doctype, which notation should I use?

1. Short:

   <meta charset="utf-8" />  

2. Long:

   <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> 

Answer 1

In HTML5, they are equivalent. Use the shorter one, as it is easier to remember and type. Browser support is fine since it was designed for backwards compatibility.

Answer 2

Both forms of the meta charset declaration are equivalent and should work the same across browsers. But, there are a few things you need to remember when declaring your web files character-set as UTF-8:

1. Save your file(s) in UTF-8 encoding without the byte-order mark (BOM).
2. Declare the encoding in your HTML files using meta charset (like above).
3. Your web server must serve your files, declaring the UTF-8 encoding in the Content-Type HTTP header.

Apache servers are configured to serve files in ISO-8859-1 by default, so you need to add the following line to your .htaccess file:

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8 

This will configure Apache to serve your files declaring UTF-8 encoding in the Content-Type response header, but your files must be saved in UTF-8 (without BOM) to begin with.

Notepad cannot save your files in UTF-8 without the BOM. A free editor that can is Notepad++. On the program menu bar, select "Encoding > Encode in UTF-8 without BOM". You can also open files and re-save them in UTF-8 using "Encoding > Convert to UTF-8 without BOM".

More on the Byte Order Mark (BOM) at Wikipedia.