Bad value “text/html; charset=Shift_JIS” for attribute “content” on element “meta”: “charset=” must be followed by “utf-8”.

A meta element with http-equiv="Content-Type" must declare utf-8 as the character encoding. Other encodings like Shift_JIS are not allowed in HTML5.

The HTML specification requires all documents to be encoded in UTF-8. The meta element's content attribute, when used with http-equiv="Content-Type", must contain exactly text/html; charset=utf-8. Legacy encodings such as Shift_JIS, EUC-JP, ISO-8859-1, and others are non-conforming.

If the document actually uses Shift_JIS encoding, it needs to be converted to UTF-8 first. Most text editors and IDEs can re-save a file in a different encoding. After converting the file, update the meta declaration to reference UTF-8.

The shorter <meta charset="utf-8"> form is equivalent and generally preferred because it is simpler.

HTML examples

Invalid encoding declaration

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Shift_JIS">

Fixed using the short form

<meta charset="utf-8">

Fixed using the http-equiv form

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

Learn more:

MDN Reference

HTML meta element - MDN

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WHATWG Spec

HTML Document Metadata - WHATWG

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MDN Reference

Character encodings - MDN

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