On Tue, 23 Nov 1999, Rod Butcher wrote:
> Am I the only battling service vendor who actually feels good when
> somebody bookmarks my website ?
No.
> I can absorb the overhead of accesses to a favorites icon.
So can I.
> This may be a security hazard for the client, but I detect a
> holier-than-thou attitude here against M$.
*cough*
> Will somebody tell me why this M$ initiative is bad, other than for
> pre-determined prejudices ?
Because, as usual, it's a decent idea implemented horribly. MS could have
simply made it an optional feature, triggered by a LINK element:
<LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" href="/path/to/favicon.ico">
which, in fact, they also support. But instead, not only does IE5 always
ask for favicon.ico, it asks for it /relative to the URL being bookmarked/.
This means that if I have a site that actually /has/ a favicon.ico file in
the root directory, /that isn't enough/. I also need to either define my
favicon using LINK tags in every document on my site, or use server-based
redirects to grab all requests for it.
It's just fundamentally stupid. I don't like it when vendors do wildly
irresponsible things.
Steve
