The meta tag, which is used for page character encoding

Great job! We’ve finished marking up the content. Now, let’s return to the <head> tag.

Notice inside the <head> is a <meta> tag. This is a single tag. In other words, it does not require a paired closing tag at the end.

The <meta> tag provides information about the page to browsers, search engines and other software. This can include the character encoding or a short description of the page. To do this, <meta> tags with various attributes and values are used. Here are some of the attributes: charset, content, http-equiv and name.

You can use the charset attribute to specify the character encoding for the HTML webpage:

<meta charset="name of character encoding">

It is always best to specify the character encoding explicitly. Otherwise, the browser may guess the encoding incorrectly and display garbled characters instead of your intended text.

The most widely used encoding in current use is utf-8. You should use it in all of your projects. Previously the windows-1251 encoding was widely used, as it was the standard encoding for Cyrillic in Windows. However, now this is considered to be bad practice.

<meta>, <link>, <title> and other tags that are included in <head> contain a special type of content — metadata. This metadata is not displayed on the page directly, but rather it is used to store information about the document and to connect the document to other documents and systems.