Actually, in IE7 using:

    <meta http-equiv='refresh' content='1,URL=ok.html'>

doesn't trigger a redirect to ok.html, but to the current page (thereby creating a reload every second). That's precisely as specified.

Are there examples of content out there in which a comma is used for redirects other than to the same page? If it's just to the same page, the comma need not be added to the syntax since the failure mode is to use the base url of the meta element.

My testing results:

Opera 12.02 - Does not redirect on ','
IE7
IE8
IE9
IE10        - Does not redirect on ','
Firefox 15  - Redirects on ','
Chrome 21   - Redirects on ','

It sounds like Opera is planning on changing behavior given the CORE bug note below (is there a public link for this?)

I'll try some queries to see what we have in the wild that uses the ',' separator.

Searched across our database of most popular sites (top 100K sites), and found ~10,500 uses of meta refresh. Of those results only two sites used a comma separator:

http://www.usfsa.org/
http://usfigureskating.org/

Both were using the same ad server:
http://adman.winnercomm.com/adman/GetAd.aspx?Zone=382 (Zone differs)

And in this case, the redirect URL matched the document URL exactly.

Unless anyone else has refuting data, I propose that we keep the spec as-is and do not also allow comma as a valid separator for an alternate URL redirect.

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Status: Accepted

Change Description:
https://github.com/w3c/html/commit/387a183c8171360833e4ceee8bb2cfc044cbf885
Now allowing commas in META refresh in place of the semicolon in @content, but not (yet) parsing as valid.

Rationale: Followed WHATWG change, because Firefox & Chrome support this, Firefox is changing, and a sufficient number of sites are using it.

> Rationale: Followed WHATWG change, because Firefox & Chrome support this,
> Firefox is changing, and a sufficient number of sites are using it.

Where's the data backing this up? And what do you mean Firefox is changing? Changing to not allow commas, or to continue to allow commas (not changing)?

(In reply to comment #5)
> > Rationale: Followed WHATWG change, because Firefox & Chrome support this,
> > Firefox is changing, and a sufficient number of sites are using it.
> 
> Where's the data backing this up? And what do you mean Firefox is changing?

Sorry, I meant to write: Opera is changing (according to comment #0).


> Changing to not allow commas, or to continue to allow commas (not changing)?

All of these are allowing the comma.

Also see the discussion at https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=17471 .