Re: HTTP-EQUIV

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@beach.w3.org)
Tue, 26 Sep 1995 13:40:16 -0400

In message <9509261630.AA27511@anti.tesi.dsi.unimi.it>, Davide Musella writes:
>Hi, I've a little problem with the HTTP EQUIV tag.
>I've a document on the Server A with the tag HTTP EQUIV...,but
>if I do an HTTP request from the server B of the HEAD of that document
>I don't receive the HTTP-EQUIV content.
>Is this a problem of HTML, HTTP, of the server A or B, of my request...????

This behaviour is controlled by server A, so that's where to put in
the fix.

But there is actually no problem at all -- all parties are acting in a
conforming manner. Server A "may" do the HTTP-EQUIV thing, but it's
not required:

http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_5.html#SEC30

HTTP-EQUIV
binds the element to an HTTP header field. An HTTP server
may use this information to process the document. In
particular, it may include a header field in the responses to
requests for this document: the header name is taken from
the HTTP-EQUIV attribute value, and the header value is
taken from the value of the CONTENT attribute.

Dan