Help on redirect url parameter

Thu Oct 16 07:54:42 EDT 1997

>We use this to make our subject web pages time out after 5 minutes
>(300 seconds) -- obviously, it goes in the <head> portion of the page:
>
><META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="300;
>URL=http://library.csun.edu/">
>
>Works nicely with Netscape, may work with other browsers.  Far as I
>can tell, it does no harm.
>

MSIE 3.x and 4.0 (Win32) understand this, as does Opera 3.0b; Opera 2.x
ignores it.  Recent versions of Lynx handle this by providing a link to the
redirect URL:

   REFRESH(300 sec): http://library.csun.edu/

If I recall correctly, some or most of the browsers that support this do
require the URL to be an absolute URL.  Also, some browsers act a little
flaky if you sent the number of seconds to zero; when I tried this for a
couple documents on our site, some users reported this effectively disabled
their back buttons.

Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu