How not to use meta refresh
Point your browser to one of the most popular websites in Australia, click on any one of their articles and you might just be unpleasantly surprised to find the page refresh automatically, even while you're reading it.
If we look at the source code, we can see that these folks force a page refresh on their readers every eight minutes:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0480">
While I can understand that a news site would do this on their front page, I fail to grasp any possible benefit for humans who happen to be reading an individual article, such as this.
Sure, it could be argued that if you can read their articles in less than eight minutes, you won't experience the annoyance of trying to figure out where you were up to, when their website pushed exactly the same content to your browser.
But why would they do this? Is it because of the possibility that an individual article's content might have changed in the last eight minutes?
No, almost certainly not.
Is it because of the possibility that the developers forgot to make sure that their implementation of meta refresh is conditional, depending on whether the user is on the front page, or an individual article?
Yes, probably.
Due to the large volume of spam, comments are disabled. If you have anything relevant to say, you can leave a comment via Twitter, or contact me directly.
About the author
I'm Ivan Lutrov and I'm the owner of Lutrov Interactive. I have 25 years of experience producing interactive work and I create cost effective business websites that are simple, engaging and easy to use. I practice what I preach and I say what I really think, even if it's sometimes not what you want to hear. Subscribe to the Lutrov Interactive feed via RSS and follow me on Twitter.