'Refresh' HTTP header

Question

I'm automating a web application (the Mantis bug tracker) and I'm getting an interesting response header from it, called Refresh:

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
...
Refresh: 0;url=my_view_page.php

It seems to be acting the same way that meta refresh does, and the meta refresh technique implies that it is an equivalent of a header in HTTP.

Problem is, I can't find any mention of the Refresh header in the HTTP standard or any other definitive documentation on how it should be parsed and what the browser should do when it encounters it.

What's going on here?

Answer 1

As far as I know, Refresh (along with Set-Cookie and possibly some other proprietary pseudo-headers) were created by Netscape in the very early days of the internet and have been basically (but not quite) standard since then. Because just about every browser supports it, Refresh is pretty safe to use -- and commonly is.

I guess it never became part of the official standards because they already had provisions for that with the status codes.