Creating an Automatic Slide Show

And now for something completely different! You can use a special feature of the meta attribute, within the head section, to automatically move the reader from one page to another. If you set up a series of pages in this way, you create a Web slide show.

To create an automatic slide show:

1.	In the first page, within the head section, type <meta http-equiv="refresh". (That's a regular hyphen between http and equiv.)
2.	Type content="n; where n is the number of seconds the current page should display on the screen.
3.	Type url=nextpage.html" /> where next-page.html is the URL of the next page that you want the visitor to jump to automatically.
4.	Repeat these steps for each page in the series.

Figure 18.59. The meta tag must be in the head section. It won't work if you place it anywhere else.

Figure 18.60. The first page on the left, loads as usual. But wait five seconds, and then the second page (on the right) loads in its place.

Tips

• Omit the meta tag in the last page of the series if you don't want to cycle around again to the beginning.

• Make sure you use a display time long enough for all of your images to load in each page.

• This is a great way to show a portfolio or other series of images without having to create a lot of links and buttons.

• Be careful with the quotation marks. Notice that the opening set comes before content and the closing set goes after the URL.