Q:

http-equiv - what's equiv stand for?

Everyone knows what http stands for Hyper Text Transport Protocol for the HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). What the heck does equiv stand for: equivalent? What does it mean. I know it can be used to specify refresh values and charset/encoding but that's no closer to understanding what it means.

A:

equiv does stand for equivalent. It's equivalent to the HTTP response header. For example, these two are the same
<META http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

The HTTP header should be used over the http-equiv meta tag though.
http://cyberprodigy.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-http-equiv-stands-for.html

