HTML redirect and .htaccess redirect. differences?

[DeanLag]

Heya,
I'm currently using HTML redirect using:
<meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="0; url=http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html">

Is there any cons using this way instead of .htaccess?

Thanks!

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Well the most obvious is that your webserver will first need to read and sent data to the client, which in turn will request a different page to be loaded. With .htaccess the first page will never even be read but the request is directly redirect to the new page.