.htaccess issue - The character encoding of the HTML document was not declared

Error: The character encoding of the HTML document was not declared. The document will render with garbled text in some browser configurations if the document contains characters from outside the US-ASCII range. The character encoding of the page must to be declared in the document or in the transfer protocol.Source File: http://localhost/path/of/the/project/    Line: 0

The website dos not load the css and it looks distorted when .htaccess file is used for web project.

To solve this error:

Add following line in your apache configuration file.
/etc/apache2/apache2.conf or /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf (according to your linux distribution)

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .htm

Restart Apache.