Introduction
Do you know the meaning of character set as concerns, HTML? Do you know the meaning of character encoding as concerns HTML? Can you produce web pages for different international languages? Do you need to know a different international language before producing a website for that language? What role does a human language translator do in the website design, for a foreign language? In this article I introduce you to a tutorial series, on HTML Character Sets. After reading the series, you will know where you stand, so far as all the above questions are concerned.

At the moment, there are five parts to the series.

The First Part of the Series
This part of the series elaborates on the meaning of character set and character encoding.

The Second Part of the Series
I remember: when I started learning computing, I was always hearing the word, ASCII. ASCII stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange". This part of the series, elaborates on that.

The Third Part of the Series
This part of the series talks about the limitation of the ASCII character set and illustrates the ISO character set as a replacement. ISO stands for "International Standard Organization".

The Fourth Character Set
When you fill an HTML Form and send the information to the server, in what encoding does the data go to the server. You need to know this encoding in order to use the Ajax technology properly. This part of the series, does not talk about Ajax; it talks about the encoding of the data sent to the server.

The Fifth Part of the Series
As a website designer, you do not need to know a foreign language, before you produce a website in that language. All websites including Chinese websites are designed using HTML, which is a kind of English.

Assuming that all the user information (page content) on a web page is in French, then instead for the start HTML tag to be <html> , it would be <html lang="fr"> . Here, you have an attribute called, lang, and the value for the attribute is, "fr" , which is the French language declaration. Each international human language has its own code value to use in that position.

So, if you are designing a web page (website) for a foreign language, you just need to know the language declaration code value and use it in place of "fr" in the start HTML tag. Of course, you will use "fr" for the French foreign language. You can then call a human translator to translate the user text content of the web page (website).

The tutorial series is part of my free web design course. I hope you will appreciate the series and the whole course. The series has been prepared in a step-by-step fashion. There is no missing special character, as you would find in web pages of other sites. The links to the different parts of the tutorial series are easily accessible from each page. To start the tutorials, click:

Tutorials for HTML Character Sets

Chrys