About This HTML Issue
The meta element's charset attribute only accepts utf-8 as its value in HTML5.
Older HTML versions and XHTML allowed character encodings like windows-1252, iso-8859-1, or shift_jis in the charset attribute. The HTML living standard restricts this to utf-8 only. UTF-8 is the required character encoding for HTML5 documents, and the W3C validator enforces this rule.
If a document actually uses a different encoding, convert the file to UTF-8 using a text editor or command line tool, then update the meta tag accordingly. Most modern text editors can save files as UTF-8.
The <meta charset="utf-8"> declaration should appear as early as possible within the <head> element, ideally as the first child. It must appear within the first 1024 bytes of the document so that browsers can detect the encoding before parsing the rest of the content.
HTML examples
Invalid charset value
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="windows-1252">
<title>Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello world</p>
</body>
</html>
Valid charset value
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello world</p>
</body>
</html>
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