Both forms of the meta charset declaration are equivalent and should work the same across browsers. But, there are a few things you need to remember when declaring your web files character-set as UTF-8:
- Save your file(s) in UTF-8 encoding without the
byte-order mark (BOM).
- Declare the encoding in your HTML files using
meta charset (like above).
- Your web server must serve your files, declaring the UTF-8 encoding in the Content-Type HTTP header.
Apache servers are configured to serve files in ISO-8859-1 by default, so you need to add the following line to your .htaccess file:
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
This will configure Apache to serve your files declaring UTF-8 encoding in the Content-Type response header, but your files must be saved in UTF-8 (without BOM) to begin with.
Notepad cannot save your files in UTF-8 without the BOM. A free editor that can is Notepad++. On the program menu bar, select "Encoding > Encode in UTF-8 without BOM". You can also open files and re-save them in UTF-8 using "Encoding > Convert to UTF-8 without BOM".
