Every piece of text you have ever seen on your screen, that actually stored in a particular character encoding. There are hundreds of different character encodings, some optimized for particular languages like Russian or Chinese or English, and others that can be used for multiple languages. Roughly speaking, the character encoding provides a mapping between the stuff you see on your screen and the stuff your computer actually stores in memory and on disk.
<!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> </head> </html>