HTML Guide
Specify the language of your HTML document using the lang attribute on the <html> element instead of using a <meta> tag for the language.
The HTML5 standard encourages specifying the primary language of a document using the lang attribute on the <html> element. The lang attribute should be set to a valid language code, such as en for English or fr for French. Using a <meta> tag to declare the document language is considered obsolete because the <meta> tag cannot convey element-specific language information. The lang attribute is more versatile and directly associates the language with the HTML document structure itself. This approach aligns better with accessibility requirements and helps user agents understand and render the content appropriately.
Here is how you should specify the language using the lang attribute:
Correct usage with lang attribute:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>Document with Language Specification</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>This document is written in English.</p>
</body>
</html>
Incorrect usage with <meta> tag:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en">
<title>This usage is considered outdated</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>This should not be done in HTML5.</p>
</body>
</html>
By defining the language with the lang attribute directly in the <html> tag, you improve the document’s compliance with modern standards and enhance the accessibility and internationalization aspects of your web content.
Learn more:
Related W3C validator issues
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.
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">The <meta charset> tag, used to define the character encoding, must appear only once in a document, within the <head> section.
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.
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 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
Instead of using the isolang attribute to define the language of the document, you can use lang with an ISO 639-1 two character code.
For example, for Portuguese:
<html lang="pt">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>The value cleartype is not valid for the property http-equiv on a meta tag.
The value Content-Script-Type is not valid for the property http-equiv on a meta tag.