In computing, a character encoding is used to represent a repertoire of characters by some kind of an encoding system. Many exist such as: * ACSII * ANSI (Windows-1252) * ISO-8859-1 * UTF-8 (Unicode) Because *ACSII* and *ANSI* are so limited, UTF-8 is recommended for most scenarios users might encounter. Meta tags allows setting the charset of a document using: ```html ``` This tag is expected to be found found at the top of the head section of the page. Thus refering to this rule as *The First 512 Bytes*. # How do I fix this ? Fixing is a matter of making sure that the `` tag is the first element of the `` section. So something like this: ```html ``` should be updated to the following: ```html ``` # Resources * [How do I fix “Error: A charset attribute on a meta element found after the first 512 bytes.”](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18007771/how-do-i-fix-error-a-charset-attribute-on-a-meta-element-found-after-the-first) * [Character encoding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding)