Page "Unicode and HTML" Paragraph 15

When a document is transmitted via a MIME message or a transport that uses MIME content types such as an HTTP response, the message may signal the encoding via a Content-Type header, such as.

Other external means of declaring encoding are permitted but rarely used.

If the document uses an Unicode encoding, the encoding info might also be present in the form of a Byte order mark.

Finally, the encoding can be declared via the HTML syntax.

For the serialisation then, as long as the page is encoded in an extension of ASCII ( such as UTF-8, and thus, not if the page is using UTF-16 ), a element, like or ( starting with HTML5 ) can be used.

For HTML pages serialized as XML, then declaration options is to either rely on the encoding default ( which for XML documents is UTF-8 ), or to use an XML encoding declaration.

The meta attribute plays no role in HTML served as XML.