Simulate an HTTP Header

The meta element can override the value of one of the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) headers. The http-equiv attribute specifies which header you want to simulate. The content attribute provides the value.

The following code specifies to the refresh(reload) the page every five seconds.

 
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
    <title>Example</title>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5" />
</head>
<body>
      <a href="http://java2s.com">Visit java2s.com</a>

</body>
</html>

There are three permitted values for the http-equiv attribute:

Attribute Value	Description
refresh	specifies a period in seconds, after which the current page should reload. You can specify a different URL to be loaded. For example: <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5; http://www.java2s.com"/>
default-style	specifies the preferred stylesheet. The value of the content attribute must match the title attribute on a script or link element in the same page.
content-type	This is an alternative way of specifying the character encoding of the HTML page. For example: <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html charset=UTF-8"/>