The question might be a bit basic – considering I'm not what the vast majority would consider a newcomer to front end web development.

I am teaching an 8 year old html, css and javascript. I'm taking the opportunity to also teach about utf-8 encoding, in particular the way HTML uses it to allow non-English characters to be encoded and displayed.

I want to show him how accented characters do not appear properly without including <meta charset="UTF-8"/>.

Surprisingly I was able to display "Á" in the test webpage when in theory this shouldn't have been possible as the utf-8 charset meta tag was missing.

After some research I came to the conclusion that in modern IDE's the encoding system comes "built in", hence there's no real need to write down <meta charset />. If this is wrong please correct me as I am currently confused as to what exactly happened and I don't want to teach wrong information to an 8 year old.

CodePudding user response：

After some research I came to the conclusion that in modern IDE's the encoding system comes "built in", hence there's no real need to write down . If this is wrong please correct me

Yes, that is wrong!

Surprisingly I was able to display "Á" in the test webpage when in theory this shouldn't have been possible as the utf-8 charset meta tag was missing.

This is also wrong, let me explain!

UTF-8 is an encoding system. This means it describes how to map bytes into textual characters. It's certainly possible to display "Á" without using utf-8.

The letter A (normal, no accents) is encoded with the number 65 in both ASCII and UTF-8. In fact, all english characters and punctuation are encoded the same way across virtually all encodings, so encoding problems rarely become apparent in English-only text.

However, accented letters, non-english characters and emojis (