WAI Checkpoint 7.5: Re-directs

Hi all,

This is my first post, so please forgive me if that has been covered in depth before. 

The above WAI checkpoint states "Until user agents provide the ability to stop auto-redirect, do
not use markup to re-direct pages automatically."

Until re-reading this just now, I had always assumed this was because client-side re-directs
depend on scripting, so could not be used as the sole means of re-directing. I have therefore
always implemented a redundant server-side re-direct in order to ensure that those with and
without scripting are re-directed to the right page.

Surely we can't be saying that re-directs are prohibited altogether (whether using mark-up or
otherwise), that would leave little room for elegant broken link handling or so-called marketing
urls (e.g. bbb.co.uk/news), on which many sites rely.

Am I missing the point here? Thoughts please, as I'm re-writing some internal guidelines and want
to be clear on this.

Rgds, Tom

Received on Thursday, 29 January 2004 08:28:03 UTC