everyday note

note

To sum up, conforming user agents must observe the following priorities when determining a document's character encoding (from highest priority to lowest):

• An HTTP "charset" parameter in a "Content-Type" field.
• A META declaration with "http-equiv" set to "Content-Type" and a value set for "charset".
• The charset attribute set on an element that designates an external resource.

In addition to this list of priorities, the user agent may use heuristics and user settings. For example, many user agents use a heuristic to distinguish the various encodings used for Japanese text. Also, user agents typically have a user-definable, local default character encoding which they apply in the absence of other indicators.