mikeal/request — Issue #92: Refresh http header is not followed
Author: rbirkby
Created: 2011-10-24 17:43:45+00:00
State: open

Some websites still send the (non-standard) Netscape-era Refresh HTTP header. This header is supported by all browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome etc)

eg: Webkit's implementation can be found here:
http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/Source/WebCore/platform/network/HTTPParsers.cpp#L106

The websites which send this Refresh HTTP header are not obscure sites which can be ignored. For example, I've received the refresh header from microsoft.com:

* Trying 207.46.19.254... connected
* Connected to www.microsoft.com (207.46.19.254) port 80 (#0)
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.19.7 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.19.7 OpenSSL/0.9.8k zlib/1.2.3.3 libidn/1.15
> Host: www.microsoft.com
> Accept: */*
>
* HTTP 1.0, assume close after body
< HTTP/1.0 200 OK
< Connection: Close
< Pragma: no-cache
< cache-control: no-cache
< Refresh: 0.1
< Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
<