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.

By Opquast - Read the license

Opquast training and certification

The objective of these rules and the Opquast community mission is ‘making the web better’ for your customers and for everyone! Opquast rules cover the key major areas of risk that can negatively affect website users such as privacy, ecodesign, accessibility and security.

Opquast training has already allowed over 13,500 web professionals to have their skills certified. Train your teams or your students, contact us