I haven’t always understood the reasoning behind favicons (you know, the things that appear up in the address bar next to the address). I remember when favicon’s started appears in Internet Explorer 4. I remember how I thought it was stupid that you had to put a file with a certain name and file format to get it to work in the root level of your browser.
To this day, that implementation decision by Microsoft still drives me mad. It’s causes a needless number of 404 errors on my web server because not every person takes the time to create one. It’s only recently that they’ve started to suggest putting it in the XHTML which seems to have helped some, but not much.
I also can’t seem to get the mime type right for them to work properly with sunfox… The only way I seem to be able to get it to work properly in IE4 and 5 is if I let apache handle the file. This probably doesn’t matter to most people, but yeah… I like my sunfox.
In any case, I do like the fact that it allows all my bookmarks to not have to share the same icon. It makes it much easier to identify what page I want to get to. The only other improvement I could really see coming for them is the ability to add them to an RSS feed so that you didn’t have to have that pesky orange icon. Heck, for all I know, they already have it and I just haven’t run into any sites making use of it. For some reason, from time to time, my posts show their favicon… But never the parent node.
I hope you will all enjoy the basic, but at least somewhat useful favicon that has been added.
Comments on this entry are closed.
I see the image, and I believe I can depict the meaning of the initials. Keeps the things I've read separate from the thing's I haven't. I like personalization, it's nice.
I think the idea (or ideal) behind favicons is that they will all have the exact same name, favicon.ico, and can therefore be accessed by anyone compiling their list of favorite sites, like at the bottom of subtraction.com
Of course, the ideal never quite seems to work out. I do know that favicons are particularly useful for those compiling sites in their bookmarks bar. For example, as long as you originally specify a name for your bookmark in firefox, you can then remove the name and be left with just the icon in your bookmarks toolbar.