Other uses of http-equiv
Here are some other uses of the http-equiv
attribute:
-
expires
Indicates the date and time after which the document should be considered expired. Web robots may use this information to delete expired documents from a search engine index. The date and time format (as shown below) follows the date/time standard for HTTP headers because the
http-equiv
attribute is intended to mimic an HTTP header field.<meta http-equiv="expires" content="Wed 12 Jun 2001 10:52:00 EST" />
-
content-language
This may be used to identify the language in which the document is written. The browser can send a corresponding
Accept-Language
header, which causes the server to choose the document with the appropriate language.This example tells the browser that the document’s natural language is French:
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="fr" />
The W3C now recommends using the
lang
andxml:lang
attributes in thehtml
element for language specification, but this method may be used for backward compatibility. For more information on internationalization and a listing of two-letter language codes, see Chapter 6.
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