On Fri, 2004-07-23 at 17:37 +1000, Voytek wrote: > <LINK rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/ico"> > <LINK rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/ico">
It's as Dave said - it's purely for eye-candy. While Mozilla [variants] and Opera usually look at what <LINK rel=icon> has to say, and fetch that as a little tab icon, some versions of IE just directly go and ask for "/favicon.ico" regardless of whether or not there was even a link to it in the page. That's probably why > I regularly see it in my error log, There is certainly no *requirement* for a page to have one. > Historical tidbit: This showed up as an undocumented feature in IE circa 2000. Instead of the IE "e" beside the address bar, it would render the icon that came from that site but only if you had a site bookmarked in IE's "favourites" list - hence "favourites icon". That requirement always struck me as strange, as well as the fixed name. [and that's why, if you're going to do one of these for a web page, don't change the name from /favicon.ico - silly, sad, I know - but that's the way it was. I don't know if IE actually respects the href now, but certainly there are masses of older browsers out there which just automatically grab for that file, specifically. I suppose it's no worse than robots.txt's fixed name, but then at least robots.txt alludes to the purpose...] Anyway, shortly thereafter Opera started sticking these cute little icons into tabs, and it caught on. AfC -- Andrew Frederick Cowie OPERATIONAL DYNAMICS Operations Consultants and Infrastructure Engineers http://www.operationaldynamics.com/
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
-- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
