Suppose you are a professor whose personal Web page is maintained by your department, and you want people who find you in the University Directory and click your Web Page URL link to be taken straight to your departmental page. There are actually three different ways to accomplish this. You can use

• an HTML tag called meta refresh or
• a UNIX symbolic link or
• a redirect command line in a .htaccess file

Method 1: Meta Refresh Tag

Note: You should make sure the META tag is used inside the HEAD of your HTML document. That means it must appear before any text or images in the body document.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="12; URL=http://www.auburn.edu/newfile.html">

Important note: make sure the URL you give is fully qualified (e.g. http://whatever/whatever). That is, don't use a relative URL.

• In this example, a new "Refresh" directive (via either the META tag or the Refresh HTTP response header) is given as a part of every retrieval. This is an important point. Each individual "Refresh" directive is one-shot and non-repeating. The directive doesn't say "go get this page every 12 seconds from now until infinity"; it says "go get this page in 12 seconds".

  Also, whatever you set the content equal to is what specifies how long the page will appear before reloading to a different page. For instance, in order to "go get" a page in 6 seconds, you would type in content="6".

• Once given the directive, the browser will do the specified retrieval after the specified amount of time. The only way to cause it not to happen is to not have an open window that contains the document.

Neat trick: the interval can be 0 seconds! This will cause the browser to load the new data as soon as it possibly can (after the current data is fully displayed).

Why even set an interval? Suppose you are a faculty member with a personal Web page that students used before you decided to use your departmental Web page. You could leave a note on your personal Web page saying that the URL has moved and that you will be transferred to the new URL in n seconds and for your students to adjust their bookmarks accordingly.

Pros and Cons of Meta Refresh

Pros

• It is very easy to use. It allows you to simply go into a file and add the tag.

• You can control whether or not the user sees the old page. You can set the content number to however many seconds you want to in order to allow a user to view the old site before transferring them to the new page. This allows the user to realize that a URL address has changed.

• You can set a Meta tag to go anywhere on the Web. Other ways of moving Web page URLs may limit you to a single server.

Cons

• The main disadvantage of the Meta refresh tag is that it breaks the Back button. This problem can be overcome by double-clicking the Back button, but many users do not know to do this.