HTML Guide
A <meta> tag has been found in the document stating that the charset is windows-1252, but it actually is utf-8. You should update the tag to reflect the actual encoding of the document, for example:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">Related W3C validator issues
In HTML5 you’re encouraged to use Unicode (UTF-8) character encoding rather than a legacy character encoding such as Latin1 (Windows-1252 or ISO 8859-1).
In short, it can be just a matter of using <meta charset="utf-8"/> in your document, but you should also ensure that your pages are also saved and served as UTF-8.
A <meta> tag has been found in the document stating that the charset is windows-1251, but it actually is utf-8. You should update the tag to reflect the actual encoding of the document, for example:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">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">There’s an incomplete or incorrectly formed <meta> tag. The <meta> tag in HTML is used to provide metadata about the HTML document. This metadata is typically specified using attributes like charset, content, http-equiv, itemprop, name, and property.
To fix this issue, you need to ensure that your <meta> tags include at least one of these attributes. Here are some examples of properly formed <meta> tags with each of these attributes:
-
Using the charset attribute:
<meta charset="UTF-8">This specifies the character encoding for the HTML document, which is crucial for displaying text correctly in different languages.
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Using the content and name attributes:
<meta name="description" content="A brief description of the webpage content.">This provides a description of the webpage content, which can be used by search engines.
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Using the http-equiv and content attributes:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="30">This specifies information to be passed to the browser, such as refreshing the page every 30 seconds.
-
Using the property and content attributes:
<meta property="og:title" content="Your Webpage Title">This is used for Open Graph meta tags, which improve the appearance of shared content on social media platforms.
Correct Usage Example
Here’s an example of an HTML document with a properly formed set of <meta> tags:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<meta name="description" content="A brief description of the webpage content.">
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="30">
<meta property="og:title" content="Your Webpage Title">
<title>Document</title>
</head>
<body>
<!-- Page content goes here -->
</body>
</html>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.
The <meta charset> tag, used to define the character encoding, must appear only once in a document, within the <head> section.
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>A <meta> element without a content, itemprop or property attributes has been found in an unexpected place.
Check its attributes and context - depending on the section of the document (<head> or <body>), the <meta> element allows different attributes.
A <meta> tag has been found that is missing its required content. Example of a valid meta tag:
<meta name="description" content="Description of the page" />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.