HTML Validation

A document must not include more than one “meta” element with its “name” attribute set to the value “description”.

About This HTML Issue

Remove duplicate <meta> elements that set the name attribute to description from your HTML document.

HTML documents should only include one <meta> element with the name attribute set to description to provide a brief summary of the webpage content. This is crucial for search engine optimization, as search engines use this information to display summaries of your pages in search results. A duplicate description meta tag can confuse search engines, possibly affecting your webpage’s visibility negatively. To resolve this, locate all <meta> elements with name="description" in your HTML and remove duplicates, leaving only one that accurately describes your content.

Example of Duplicate Meta Tags

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <title>Sample Page</title>
  <meta name="description" content="This is a description of the page.">
  <meta name="description" content="Another description here.">
  <meta name="author" content="John Doe">
</head>
<body>
  <h1>Welcome to the Sample Page</h1>
  <p>This page serves as an example for HTML structure.</p>
</body>
</html>

Corrected Version

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <title>Sample Page</title>
  <meta name="description" content="This is a description of the page.">
  <meta name="author" content="John Doe">
</head>
<body>
  <h1>Welcome to the Sample Page</h1>
  <p>This page serves as an example for HTML structure.</p>
</body>
</html>

Ensure that the content for the description meta tag is meaningful and relevant to what visitors can expect to find on the web page.

Learn more:

Last reviewed: April 21, 2025

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Reading time

1 min read

Category

HTML Validation

Engine

W3C Validator

Last reviewed

April 21, 2025

Resources

Related W3C Validator Issues (26)

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

charset
meta

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.

A document must not include both a “meta” element with an “http-equiv” attribute whose value is “content-type”, and a “meta” element with a “charset” attribute.

In order to define the charset encoding of an HTML document, both of these options are valid, but only one of them must appear in the document:

<!-- This is the preferred way -->

<meta charset="UTF-8">

<!-- This is the older way, also valid -->

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

A document must not include more than one “meta” element with a “charset” attribute.

meta
charset

A “meta” element with an “http-equiv” attribute whose value is “X-UA-Compatible” must have a “content” attribute with the value “IE=edge”.

The only value admitted for the attribute content in a <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible"> is currently IE=edge. You’re probably seeing this issue because the page being validated includes the following meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1" />

As the Google Chrome Frame plugin was discontinued on February 25, 2014, this is longer supported so you should change that meta tag to:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />

According to this article in Wikipedia:

Google Chrome Frame was a plug-in designed for Internet Explorer based on the open-source Chromium project, first announced on September 22, 2009. It went stable in September 2010, on the first birthday of the project. It was discontinued on February 25, 2014 and is no longer supported.

The plug-in worked with Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8 and 9. It allowed suitably coded web pages to be displayed in Internet Explorer by Google Chrome’s versions of the WebKit layout engine and V8 JavaScript engine.

Attribute “charset” not allowed on element “meta” at this point.

meta
charset

A <meta> tag has been found that is either malformed, or in a bad place within the document. Check its attributes and context.

For example, the following HTML contains a valid <meta> tag that is raising an issue because of bad context, caused by an <img> tag that shouldn’t be there:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="">
  <head>
    <title>Test</title>
    <img src="photo.jpg" alt="A smiling cat" />
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Some content</p>
  </body>
</html>

If we fix that document and move the <img> tag within the body, the issue raised about <meta> disappears because it’s now in a valid context:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="">
  <head>
    <title>Test</title>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Some content</p>
    <img src="photo.jpg" alt="A smiling cat" />
  </body>
</html>

Attribute “http-equiv” not allowed on element “meta” at this point.

A <meta> element using the http-equiv attribute has been found in an unexpected place of the document. It should appear inside the <head> section, like in this example:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="">
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
    <title>Test</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Content of the page</p>
  </body>
</html>

The http-equiv attribute is used in web pages to simulate an HTTP response header. While HTTP response headers can be set from the server, not everyone has access to the server configuration, so an alternative is using <meta http-equiv> to define settings that would otherwise require setting an HTTP response header.

The most popular use of http-equiv are defining the content-type of the document as in the example above, although in HTML5 it’s preferred to use this instead:

<meta charset="UTF-8">

Another popular use of the http-equiv is setting an automatic reload of the web page, for example this will have the browser reload the page every 60 seconds:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="60">

However, refreshing a page automatically is a bad practice regarding accessibility, as users do not expect a page to do that, and doing so will move focus back to the top of the page, which may create a frustrating or confusing experience.

Other values that can be used with the http-equiv attribute include:

content-security-policy
content-length.
content-encoding
default-style
window-target

Attribute “name” not allowed on element “meta” at this point.

meta
name

A <meta> tag has been found that is either malformed, or in a bad place within the document. Check its attributes and context.

For example, the following HTML contains a valid <meta> tag that is raising an issue because of bad context, caused by an <img> tag that shouldn’t be there:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="">
  <head>
    <title>Test</title>
    <img src="photo.jpg" alt="A smiling cat" />
    <meta name="description" content="Description of this page" />
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Some content</p>
  </body>
</html>

If we fix that document and move the <img> tag within the body, the issue raised about <meta> disappears because it’s now in a valid context:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="">
  <head>
    <title>Test</title>
    <meta name="description" content="Description of this page" />
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>Some content</p>
    <img src="photo.jpg" alt="A smiling cat" />
  </body>
</html>

Bad value “Cache-Control” for attribute “http-equiv” on element “meta”.

The value “Cache-Control” is not valid for the http-equiv attribute in a meta tag.

The http-equiv attribute in the meta tag is used to define HTTP header equivalents, and it has specific valid values, such as “content-type”, “expires”, “refresh”, and “content-security-policy”. Most commonly used values are defined in the HTML specifications.

To resolve this issue, you must remove or correct the http-equiv attribute value. If controlling cache behavior is necessary, it should be handled via server configuration rather than within the HTML document using a meta tag.

Example

Incorrect usage:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache">
</head>
<body>
  <p>Sample text on the page.</p>
</body>
</html>

Corrected version (removing the invalid meta tag):

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<!-- Cache-Control should be configured on the server-side -->

</head>
<body>
  <p>Sample text on the page.</p>
</body>
</html>

You might configure caching on your web server (e.g., Apache, Nginx) to handle Cache-Control instead of using an invalid meta tag in your HTML.

Bad value “cleartype” for attribute “http-equiv” on element “meta”.

Bad value “Content-Script-Type” for attribute “http-equiv” on element “meta”.

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