Greg Miller wrote: > > That's not a terrible increase in bandwidth (the exact figures would > depend on protocol overhead and such), but web hosts have a nasty habit > of charging for disk space, which often includes the space for those log > files that shoot up by over 20% if everyone adopts this favicon practice > or 7% with the hypothetical 30% marketshare that was mentioned earlier.
It might be going out on a limb, but it sounds as though the real bandwidth problem is the collection of logfiles to generate statistics... I've encountered this, the logfiles tend to take up far more space than the websites they cater for and quickly eat up gigabytes of space, but this is really a different issue that argues for better management of logfiles. If your site is small I see little point in collecting anything but minimal filtered statistics, a summary rather than lots of raw data. As a user I've found the feature quite useful, especially when using tabbed browsing, and I can't see that either Mozilla, Konqueror or even Netscape, have the clout to get people to put <link>'s to a favicon on every page of their site. Whereas I've been surprised by how many sites do have them... Though, as useful as I find this, I think that checking for favicons when: 1) bookmarking 2) visiting a bookmarked site without a cached 404 for the favicon would be a better compromise than the current one. The reason being that you'd get a favicon for you most visited sites. Why would I want an icon cached for any old site I just happened to visit? They're only really useful for sites I visit regularly. 2) is for sites I already haved bookmarked which may not yet have acquired a favicon. It may cause a bit of noise in logs, but a far more acceptable amount, takes advantage of the caching of favicon status and only comes from visitors who care enough to bookmark your pages. You could also have a pref "use favourite icons for bookmarks" to let this be turned on or off. ian.
