Greetings. [...] > [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. [...] > 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. [..horror story clipped]
But, in fact, redirects - either implicit or explicit - have many ways of biting the unwary (and curiously, or perhaps not, IE always a key role). Consider MS KB Article Q160013: "If a CGI application returns a MIME Type that is unknown or not associated to Internet Explorer internally, Internet Explorer makes two POST requests to the server." What this means is that (for instance), sending a PDF file as the result of a POST request may cause the following sequence of events: 1) the file is downloaded 2) it is removed from the disk cache as the second POST request goes out 3) Acroread is launched and then says "No such file". this bug is active on many, many versions of IE. It happens if you either send the file directly OR issue a redirect. The only workaround I could find was a meta-http-refresh. And then I found out that using '0' as a refresh time won't work on Mozilla (who tries to refressh the *current* page every 0 seconds and gets stuck in a loop- not nice). So what's a poor programmer to do, caught between standards and arguably buggy browsers? Cheers, alf P.S. Anybody knows of a better solution to Q160013, I'd like very much to hear about it...TIA.
