Meta tags can also be used to cause actions in the browser itself. The most common is the “refresh” meta tag, useful for having a page that is often updated auto-reload in the browser window (the index page of CNN.com being a good example) or to redirect the user to another page automatically (as when a site has moved from one URL to another, and you want people who bookmarked the old site to be automatically redirected to the site’s new location).

Again, the meta tag is written inside the head section of the document:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;url=http://www.cnn.com">

The number immediately after the content is the number of seconds before the refresh takes place, following it after a comma is the URL to which the page will go. (If there is no URL placed here, the page will simply reload itself).

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