The first line you need inside the head i.e. <meta charset="utf-8"> is the charset declaration. The charset attribute specifies the character encoding used by the document. A character encoding declaration is a mechanism by which the character encoding used to store or transmit a document is specified. It is extremely important to declare character encoding just after starting <head> tag before any element that contains text, such as <title> element and, with in the first 1024 bytes of the document, failing to do so will cause browsers to guess the encoding.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<!-- rest of document -->
...
</html>
Is it mandatory to specify character encoding?
Although it is not mandatory however it is a good practice to specify this information explicitly.
If you do not specify <meta charset="utf-8"> in the HEAD of the HTML document, the browser will look for the Content-Type response HTTP header sent from the server.
What is UTF-8?
UTF-8 (case insensitive) is a character encoding capable of encoding all possible characters (called code points) in Unicode. The encoding is variable-length and uses 8-bit code units.
Unicode provides a unique number for every character
As of HTML5 the recommended charset is UTF-8.
Summary
Choosing the right character encoding is important. Use UTF-8 if at all possible, especially for multilingual sites.
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