For static web pages, it may be necessary to add the MIME Type for HTML to the HTTP web server configuration to send the appropriate Content-Type header. With the Apache HTTP Server, for example, the HTML 5 MIME Type can be added to the .htaccess file(s):

AddType application/xhtml+xml;charset=UTF-8 html

For a detailed explanation of why the Content-Type header is set to application/xhtml+xml, see HTML 5's HTML Serialization.

It is highly recommended that the charset attribute specifying the character encoding of the HTML page be included in the Content-Type header for non-XML user agents as well as in the xml declaration for XML parsers.