charset (HTML attribute)
| Depr. | Version |
|---|---|
| No | HTML 4 |
| IE5.5+ | FF1+ | SA1.3+ | OP10 | CH2+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Full | Full | Full | None | Full |
Syntax
Description
The
charset attribute defines the character encoding
used in a linked script file (which is referred to by the src attribute). You’d use
this attribute when the character encoding employed by the external
JavaScript file differs from that of the main document. For example, the
external script file has the following script:
If the document that links to
this eternal file is declared as using "ISO 8859-1"
encoding, the alert text would be unreadable nonsense. Adding
charset="utf-8" to the script start
tag makes it display correctly.
Example
This example shows a
script file that’s using a slightly different character
encoding from the default "ISO-8859-1":
<script type="text/javascript" src="/scripts/common.js" charset="ISO-8859-15"></script>
Value
The charset
attribute takes as its value a space and/or a comma-delimited list of
character sets, as set out in RFC 2045 (a
fun bit of bedtime reading).
Compatibility
| Internet Explorer | Firefox | Safari | Opera | Chrome | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5.5 | 6.0 | 7.0 | 8.0 | 1.0 | 1.5 | 2.0 | 3.0 | 3.5 | 1.3 | 2.0 | 3.1 | 4.0 | 9.2 | 9.5 | 10.0 | 2.0 |
| Full | Full | Full | Full | Full | Full | Full | Full | Full | Full | Full | Full | Full | Full | Full | None | Full |
This attribute is
generally well supported, but strangely appears to have fallen off the
supported attribute list with Opera version 10. Using the simple alert
test shown above, earlier versions of Opera displayed the characters
correctly, but Opera 10 behaved as if no charset
was specified at all, making the alert
unreadable.
User-contributed notes
There are no comments yet.
