It’s Called Web Design

Okay, sometimes you need to move (redirect) an HTML page. It happens to everyone! But really want to never ever never Meta Redirects. In fact, the W3C has pronounced it in their top ten mistakes of new web design: http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/reback

If you can’t or won’t make an .htaccess redirect, perhaps you can use another language at your disposal.

For example:

ColdFusion Redirect:

<.cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved permanently">
<.cfheader name="Location" value="http://www.new-url.com">

PHP Redirect:

Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );

ASP Redirect:

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www.new-url.com/"
%>

JSP (Java) Redirect:

<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( "Location", "http://www.new-url.com/" );
response.setHeader( "Connection", "close" );
%>

CGI PERL Redirect:

$q = new CGI;
print $q->redirect("http://www.new-url.com/");

Ruby on Rails Redirect:

def old_action
headers["Status"] = "301 Moved Permanently"
redirect_to "http://www.new-url.com/"
end

And if you have CPanel, Plesk, or some other web-based domain-management system they probably have a way for you to tap directly into Apache and make that change in a nice GUI.

If some inexplicatble reason you are compelled to use Meta Redirects, please use the techniques found here so that Google and your browser can make sense of what’s going on:

http://itscalledwebdesign.com/meta-redirect/

Some external links:

http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_redirection

Tags: meta, redirect

This entry was posted on Friday, September 26th, 2008 at 2:26 pm and is filed under HTML, PHP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.