Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Inventing Favicon.ico

ruthlessray.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–18 of 18 posts

Re: Inventing Favicon.ico

#11

Post by vxNsr »

Killswitch wrote: post #10

Nice article. I love how some of the most widely used stuff now days is just something random that some developer at the time thought up whimsically.

yeah, I have no idea what our bookmarks bars would look like without favicons, especially if you used firefox's extension that shows just the favicon (which was one of the reasons I held onto firefox for so long).

There's a video somewhere of Mark Zuckerberg and some co-workers discussing ideas about Facebook (in it's earliest days), and in the video they are trying to decide on what options should be available under the relationship field, one guy says something like: "I feel like we should make it possible to say that.. like you're not in a relationship per se, but nor are you free, like it's complicated..."

Re: Inventing Favicon.ico

#12

Post by pilif »

msoad wrote: post #8

I thought favicon is W3C standard. It's not standardized yet! I can't find any specs for it!

You're supposed to be using a tag. See http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...

This has some advantages over just blindly loading one file (no HTTP request if there's no image, though browsers still all try /favicon.ico nowadays) and you get to chose where to place the icon (probably together with other images of your site).

I think by now all browsers support but all of them still request /favicon.ico so by adding that you a) don't have to change your markup for the icon and b) you silence the error log of your web server - all in one go.

Re: Inventing Favicon.ico

#14

Post by masklinn »

pilif wrote: post #12
msoad wrote: post #8

I thought favicon is W3C standard. It's not standardized yet! I can't find any specs for it!

You're supposed to be using a tag. See http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/... This has some advantages over just blindly loading one file (no HTTP request if there's no image, though browsers still all try /favicon.ico nowadays) and you get to chose where to place the icon (probably together with other images of your site). I think by now all browsers support but all of them still request /fa…

> This has some advantages over just blindly loading one file (no HTTP request if there's no image, though browsers still all try /favicon.ico nowadays) and you get to chose where to place the icon (probably together with other images of your site).

Also, browsers which aren't MSIE can use PNG, GIF (including animated) or JPEG favicons.

> I think by now all browsers support

Only rel=icon is necessary in most browser, rel="shortcut icon" is for MSIE lte 9.

> but all of them still request /favicon.ico

(if no icon is specified)

Re: Inventing Favicon.ico

#15

Post by masklinn »

kevingadd wrote: post #3
pedromorgan wrote: post #2

having read it.. You need to get a life and realise how much pain and suffering you have caused us all non m$ users. To this day its a pain.. even a png auto would suffice.. What would be your plan NOW ? For everyones sanity . check

ICO's a perfectly reasonable format for small icons, and PNG was still a new format then. I've written stuff that handled the ICO format; it's simpler and easier to load than PNG/GIF/JPG (unless you already have libraries for the latter, of course - which wasn't a given in browsers at the time). I don't think their choice was wrong at all, especially since ICO loading was at the time built into the OS, so any Windows…

And ICO has the huge advantage that you can provide multiple bitmap sizes (and color depths) in a single file, avoiding the bullshit of having to specify 6 different icons for 6 different size specs.

Technically, ICO is really a container more than an image format, the original ICO just contained bitmap data, since Vista you can also put PNG data in your ICO file (which MSIE recommends for 256x256 icons).

A similar alternative being Apple's (somewhat more flexible) ICNS

Re: Inventing Favicon.ico

#16

Post by garethadams »

Killswitch wrote: post #10

Nice article. I love how some of the most widely used stuff now days is just something random that some developer at the time thought up whimsically.

This kind of ad-hoc innovation is something which is basically dead now.

Back then the number of people involved in browser and web technology was small. Now, even the brightest mind will have any new idea critiqued and iterated by thousands of equally bright minds whether they like it or not.

It's probably too much to say that there are no new ideas in web browsers any more, but it's certainly harder to find them thanks to how collaborative the Internet has made the world (that's almost ironic)

Re: Inventing Favicon.ico

#17

Post by MichaelApproved »

Reminds me about the story of

TLDR - guys were drinking and kicked around the idea of the blink tag. One of them left late that night to implement the tag overnight.

http://www.montulli.org/theoriginofthe%3Cblink%3Etag HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3865141

Re: Inventing Favicon.ico

#18

Post by dspillett »

> noticed an unusual spike in HTTP requests for /favicon.ico

I remember a guy at Uni reacting to this in a fit of anti-MS pique ("How DARE they go making useless non-standard requests to my server behind my viewers' backs!!!!!!!") and putting a large meaningless file there for IE to find. It didn't take him long to work out he was only hurting himself...

Post reply on HN