Re: HTTP-EQUIV in META

Roy T. Fielding (fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU)
Sat, 11 Feb 95 00:05:16 EST

>> I tried to use
>> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Location" CONTENT="the new URL"> in the <HEAD> of
>> a document to redirect the client to the new URL. It does not work
>> with NCSA httpd 1.3.
>
> I don't think there is a large body of software which uses the META
> tag to do anything yet. It's a relatively new tag, without much
> prior practice that I know of.

There is not a large body of *servers* that use it, though I believe
John Franks' WN server does. There is a large body of software
that uses it for indexing and maintenance.

The HTTP-EQUIV attribute allows the author to state that the content
has the semantics of this HTTP header field and can be considered as
such if the server desires it. The mechanism by which the server would
obtain or use that information is not defined -- it may be via batch
pre-processing, dynamic extraction, or not at all.

Whether or not a particular HTTP header field is allowed to be specified
by the META element is entirely up to the server.

.....Roy Fielding ICS Grad Student, University of California, Irvine USA
<fielding@ics.uci.edu>
<URL:http://www.ics.uci.edu/dir/grad/Software/fielding>