On May 5, 2008, at 10:28 AM, Ernest Cline wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Anne van Kesteren <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: May 5, 2008 5:27 AM
On Sun, 04 May 2008 02:38:03 +0200, Ernest Cline
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Perhaps, but it means adding attributes to <link> elements that will
only be needed for a single link type. If the use case for these
attributes is strong enough to add special purpose attributes for
use
with only <link rel=icon> then I dare say that it is strong enough
to
have a special purpose <icon> element so as to keep user agents from
having to deal with nonsense such as <link rel=stylesheet height=32
width=32>
<icon> would not be backwards compatible. In some user agents (at
least
Opera and Firefox) that would imply a <body> element for instance.
Would making <icon> an optional content of <title> break backwards
compatibility? The incompatibility problem you mention comes from
the start and end tags of both <head> and <body> being optional.
That isn't the case for title and it makes sense syntactically to
place it there as the icon is part of the identifying information
for the document.
<title> is parsed as CDATA, so tags inside it are not processed as
such, and instead become part of the title. Try opening a document
containing this to see:
<title><icon src="foo.jpg">This is some fancy title</title>
Thus, putting <icon> in the <title> would look terrible in all
existing user agents (at least ones that display the title), in
addition to being a total hack.
In addition, if we add <icon>, UAs will have to parse both <link
rel="icon"> (since many sites already specify icons this way,
sometimes 16x16 but sometimes bigger) and the new <icon>, but the old
way will have no way to specify size data. In fact, if a site has
icons with sizes from 16x16 up to anything you could reasonably want,
it will have to link it with <link rel="icon"> to support older
browsers and then again with <icon> to specify the size data.
So, on further reflection, I think a new <icon> element would be a bad
way to go.
Regards,
Maciej
