Meta http-equiv - sent as part of an HTTP header, or does the client parse the body for meta tags?

Question

Wikipedia seems to imply that the <meta http-equiv> on the webpage forces the server to update the response header, but this does not sound right to me, as the server will have to parse the document before sending it. That would be frantic.

But I can’t find much of what does when <meta http-equiv> . It seems to me that the client is analyzing the page and picks up everything that was sent in the HTTP header if the <meta http-equiv> found to be in conflict with the header.

Does anyone know what the real process is and / or have any ideas on where I can find additional information about this topic?

Thanks!
Greg

Answer 1

The servers had to parse the HTML, extract the <meta> and send it to the real HTTP headers. As you can guess, this is not implemented on any major web server.

Clients are currently reading <meta http-equiv> . However, this does not look like the "equivalent" of HTTP headers. It maintains a short whitelist of specific values , most of which are designed to be compatible with legacy content.