Goal
- Display pages offline correctly, by telling the browser which character set was used.
- Prevent the risk of character display problems associated with the sometimes unsure functioning of browsers’ catch-up mechanisms when they don’t receive the necessary information from the HTTP content-type header.
- Improve the accessibility of content for people with disabilities.
- Improve the way content is taken into account by search engines and indexing tools.
Implementation
The meta element is completed according to the actual encoding of the document and its MIME type in the format:
meta charset="utf-8"in HTML5
Find out more:
Control
This criterion can be checked by examining the source code, using a development tool. For each page:
- Check that the meta element http-equiv = "Content- Type" or charset is there.
- Check the relevance of the character set indicated in its content or charset attribute.