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HTTP-EQUIV

Was that confusing? Ok, let's start from the beginning. Whenever a web server sends a web page it also sends an additional set of information about the page called headers. The browser doesn't display these headers, it uses them internally to understand how to display the page. Here's an example of some page headers:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2001 15:54:22 GMT

Server: Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) ApacheJServ/1.1.2 Mod_dtcl 0.6.4 PHP/3.0.18

Last-Modified: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 00:28:46 GMT

ETag: "75f87-200-3b32913e"

Accept-Ranges: bytes

Content-Length: 512

Connection: close

Content-Type: text/html

The purpose of HTTP-EQUIV is to tell the browser to pretend that an additional header was sent. So, for example, if we wanted to tell the browser to act as if a header like this were sent:

Refresh: 5

we would use a tag like this:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="5">

The contents of HTTP-EQUIV are case-insensitive. The most common use for HTTP-EQUIV is for redirecting. See META for Automatic Refreshing and Forwarding for more details.

<META NAME="...">

<META CONTENT="...">