On Tue, 24 Mar 2015 02:41:30 +0100, Andrea Rendine
<master.skywalker...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi everybody!
A request starting from <meta> element and its refresh state: why doesn't
the document interface expose the refresh timeout?
Because nobody implemented it and nobody asked for it (until now).
The ideal would be to
expose it in read/write mode, as authors have evolved several variants of
location.href/replace/refresh/reload. And for "several" I mean 534:
http://www.phpied.com/files/location-location/location-location.html .
This list does not show that anyone wants to read or write to meta refresh.
Having a writable property would allow e.g. to delay the refresh
Why is that useful?
or even to
stop the pragma "refresh" instruction and replace it with a timed AJAX
recall of specifi contents, maintaining a nonscript whole-page refresh
for
cases where scripts are disabled/unavailable.
You can use <noscript><meta ...></noscript>. Is that sufficient? (It fails
when scripting is enabled but the script fails to run for other reasons.)
How about providing a link that the user can follow?
But even without a writable property, it would be useful to just have
"read"-level properties such as document.refreshTime and
document.refreshUrl . Consider that refresh time (along with a refresh
URI)
can be set by (non-standard (why non-standard?)) header response, a
<meta>
element already present (and there can be more than one, as UAs know how
to
handle this error) or even being inserted at runtime. So it is difficult
to
access this information without a proper interface.
Why is it useful to read the timeout and url?
I think Refresh as an HTTP header is not specified anywhere, so per spec
it shouldn't work. However I think browsers all support it, so it would be
good to specify it.
Besides that, the spec says that UAs may expose the time (and other
aspects) for a refresh event of the document and it also refers to the
possibility for a user to "cancel the redirect", while as of now users
aren't even informed, let alone allowed to interact with this event.
--
Simon Pieters
Opera Software
