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HTML Guide

A “charset” attribute on a “meta” element found after the first 1024 bytes.

The <meta charset> is expected to appear at the beginning of the document, within the first 1024 bytes. Consider moving it to the beginning of the <head> section, as in this example:

<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  ...
</head>

A character encoding declaration is a mechanism by which the character encoding used to store or transmit a document is specified. For HTML documents, the standard way to declare a document character encoding is by including a <meta> tag with a charset attribute, typically <meta charset="utf-8">.

According to the W3C standard:

The element containing the character encoding declaration must be serialized completely within the first 1024 bytes of the document.

Learn more:

Related W3C validator issues