Question about <meta> tags

[Mr Initial Man]

What is the http-equiv attribute for? I can't really make head or tail of W3C

[Kravvitz]

They are roughly the equivalent of HTTP headers.

[Mr Initial Man]

Could you explain that in layman terms?

[Kravvitz]

Every document sent from a web server has a few http headers attached to the beginning. They tell things like what type of file it is, how old it is, and whether the browser should cache it or not.

http://www.wdvl.com/Internet/Protoco...P/Headers.html

[Mr Initial Man]

What this is for, is for a tutorial on HTML. I'm going from the ground up, so to explain the http-equiv attribute, I'd need to explain HTTP Headers, and what they do.

[Charles]

So you don't know what you are talking about but you're writing a tutorial about it. Don't you think that we have enough of that on the web already?

[Mr Initial Man]

Look at it this way, Charles. I'm doing research for a report. Basically, what I'm doing for this tutorial is teaching how HTML works. And currently, I'm a little stuck on what the attributes for <meta> tags work.

[Kravvitz]

Perhaps reading the HTML 4.01 Specs will help:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/...html#edef-META

[Mr Initial Man]

I already looked at that. Couldn't quite figure it out.

[Kravvitz]

Hmm.... ok...

Perhaps you could be more specific about what you don't understand about it?

[Mr Initial Man]

In my tutorial, I'm going right down to the very basics. I'm explaining how HTML works.

Which means explaining what http-equiv actually does. I'm avoiding jargon as much as possible.

[Kravvitz]

Why do you want to give that much detail?

Why would someone who doesn't know the jargon want that much detail?

These might be helpful:
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1945.html
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html

[Mr Initial Man]

To answer the question "Why do I do this?"

[kiwibrit]

This is a pretty thorough explanation:
http://vancouver-webpages.com/META/metatags.detail.html