Meta Refresh: Count starts after page load or before?

Question

<meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="0; url=http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html"&gt;

Does the count start from full page load or as soon as the page is loading.

Having tested it, it looks to me it starts counting after full page load?

I appreciate a confirm before I continue with this solution. I didn't like Javascripts timeout.

Will this play nicely with IE6?

Answer 1

I think after page load too, and Yes, its working well with IE6.

but best way is the redirecting with 301, 302 URL redirection from server, Meta Refresh is kind of deprecated one, still working though.

Answer 2

I expect it's implementation-dependent when this happens (although that doesn't mean all implementations don't do much the same thing; one would have to test). The HTML5 spec doesn't address when the countdown begins.

But how much does it really matter? The time is in seconds, and we're all shooting for sub-second page load times anyway, right? ;-)

IE6 respects the refresh header, yes (including as a meta tag).