# How many sites specify Charset in headers?
**URL:** https://discuss.httparchive.org/t/how-many-sites-specify-charset-in-headers/189
**Category:** Analysis
**Created:** [March 7, 2014, 9:50pm UTC](https://discuss.httparchive.org/t/how-many-sites-specify-charset-in-headers/189 "2014-03-07T21:50:00Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@stevesoudersorg](https://discuss.httparchive.org/u/stevesoudersorg)
#### Post date: [March 7, 2014, 9:50pm UTC](https://discuss.httparchive.org/t/how-many-sites-specify-charset-in-headers/189/1 "2014-03-07T21:50:00Z")
Ilya recently [tweeted](https://twitter.com/igrigorik/status/442008301027356672) about Eric Lawrence’s important [article](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2011/07/18/optimal-html-head-ordering-to-avoid-parser-restarts-redownloads-and-improve-performance.aspx) about making sure to specify a Charset for HTML documents. Without it the browser may have to restart parsing the HTML or display it with errors. As Eric says, “for functionality and performance reasons, it is a best-practice to specify the encoding using HTTP response headers.”
Specifying the Charset is done within the Content-Type response header. Here’s a quick check on how many websites do this.
The number of HTML documents in the most recent crawl is 291,356:
````sql
select count(*) as num from httparchive:runs.2014_02_01_requests
where firsthtml=true```
Of those, the number that specify Charset is 194,368:
````
select count(\*) as num from httparchive:runs.2014\_02\_01\_requests
where firsthtml=true and resp\_content\_type like “%charset%”```
Conclusion: Across the top ~300K websites 67% specify Charset in an HTTP header.
---
### Author:  [@fhoffa](https://discuss.httparchive.org/u/fhoffa)
#### Post date: [March 14, 2014, 3:47pm UTC](https://discuss.httparchive.org/t/how-many-sites-specify-charset-in-headers/189/2 "2014-03-14T15:47:22Z")
> [@stevesoudersorg](#):
>
> select count(\*) as num from httparchive:runs.2014\_02\_01\_requests
> where firsthtml=true and resp\_content\_type like “%charset%”
Just for fun, in one query:
```sql
select
count(*) as num,
resp_content_type like "%charset%" has_charset,
ratio_to_report(num) over() ratio
from httparchive:runs.2014_02_01_requests
where firsthtml=true
group by has_charset
```