On Tue, 5 Nov 2002 at 22:52, Chris Shiflett opined: [snip] CS:The W3C's stance on refresh is the same for the header as well as the CS:meta tag: they did not originally intend for it to be used to specify a CS:*different* URL as a rudimentary method of redirection. They meant it to CS:be used to refresh the current resource only. However, this "rogue" CS:practice of redirection is quite common with both the header and the CS:meta tag and is very well supported by browsers. In fact, I am not aware CS:of any Web client that supports refresh but also limits the URL to the CS:current resource only.
i was bitten by this assumption recently. case in point: i needed to develop a way to display several images as a slideshow using plain html files. i would glob the images, and in each html file i inserted a meta refresh that would load the next image in the series after a 7 second delay. since the html files were eventually going to be burned to a cd, i had to point to each new file as such: <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="7;file02.html"> because i cannot always assume to know the user's cd-rom drive designation. this worked fine in netscape and mozilla, but did not work at all in internet explorer versions previous to 5.5. in older versions of ie, it simply refreshed the current page after the 7 second delay, no matter what was put after the semicolon in the content attribute. so i had to include instructions for the users that if they used internet explorer, they must upgrade to at least version 5.5 for the slideshow to work. of course, i had tested the app on ie 5.5, so i didn't discover this myself until a user contact me and complained the slideshow wasn't working. and you'd be surprised how many old versions of ie are being used out there.