Re: LYNX-DEV Refresh

[David Woolley]

> 
> 
> Hi, what is meaning of the message:
> 
>      Refresh ( 33 secs):  http://etc
> 
> which sometimes appears on dumps?
> On occassion that is the only thing that appears...


Netscape thought it would be a good gimmick if you could chain together
a sequence of web pages to form a slide show, or periodically update the 
same page, so they unilaterally invented a new HTTP header specifying a
delay and an optional URL.  (Normally this doesn't appear as a header,
but as a META tag in the HTML, however, MSIE (and I think Lynx) will
recognize it as a true header.

In your case, it would appear that this is being used for the original
purpose, however, many people want one URL to actually return another
URL and either through ignorance, or because their web server provider
considers it too expensive a service to provide, they don't use the
proper method of doing this with HTTP (the common reasons for doing
redirects are to redirect from a small site with the "right" name to
a larger cheaper site, to redirect from an old site to a new, possibly
more prestigious one, or to return a static page from a dynamic page -
the last one ALWAYS has the option of doing a proper redirect.
As a simulated redirect, it always appears as a META tag.

A Refresh with a zero or short delay and a blank screen represents
a typically lazy use to simulate redirect (the specificatin for the
proper way of doing redirects says that you back even these up by a
page to display on browsers which don't understand it).  Refresh with a
longer delay and blank screen is probably the creative department going
overboard (I think the contact-themovie site does this (accessed with
MSIE, but annoying when you know that this time delay is still being
billed by the phone company).

Lynx believes that people should be given a chance to read the original
page (assuming the original aim of animation), rather than be automatically
chained, so it treats refresh as a link.


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