Sounds like you are using HTML 5 meta tags with a XHTML document type. This document type requires tags which normally do not have a closing tag to be closed using a space and the symbol /. Example: " <br /> " Same for the meta tag, image tag, etc..
Try:
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
Looks like you have made the corrections already.