| Computer Desktop Encyclopedia: favicon |
(FAVorites ICON) When a Web page is bookmarked, a favicon is the icon used in place of the standard icon next to the name in the Favorites list. The browser obtains the icon by looking for the FAVICON.ICO file on the Web site. See Favorites.
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| Wikipedia: Favicon |
A favicon (short for favorites icon), also known as a website icon, shortcut icon, url icon, or bookmark icon is a 16x16 pixel square icon associated with a particular website or webpage.[1] A web designer can create such an icon and install it into a website (or webpage) by several means, and most graphical web browsers will then make use of it. Browsers that provide favicon support typically display a page's favicon in the browser's address bar and next to the page's name in a list of bookmarks. Browsers that support a tabbed document interface typically show a page's favicon next to the page's title on the tab. The Microsoft Windows Shell also uses favicons to represent "Internet shortcuts" to web pages.
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The original means of defining a favicon, introduced in Internet Explorer 5, was by placing a file called favicon.ico in the root directory of a web server.[2] This would then automatically be used in Internet Explorer's favorites (bookmarks) display. Later, however, a more flexible system was created using HTML to indicate the location of an icon for any given page. As detailed below, this is achieved by adding a link element to the <head> section of the document which specifies the type of the image file and its location. In this way any image file defined by the standard may be used. Although many still use the ICO format, other browsers (though notably not Microsoft's Internet Explorer) now also support PNG and GIF (including animated GIFs). Firefox reads JPEG favicons, too.
Microsoft Internet Explorer only truly supports icons that have legitimate Microsoft Icon Files.[2] Many webmasters have changed their preferred image's file extension to .ico without converting them to Microsoft Icon Files. This creates a conflict that Microsoft Internet Explorer cannot resolve; such icon images will not be displayed.
Most modern browsers implement both methods of favicon support.
The original favicon feature was created by Microsoft for Internet Explorer which would request a favicon from a set URL (/favicon.ico) in the root directory of every website. Microsoft's supported format for the link tag did not conform to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML recommendation [3] because:[2]
rel attribute must contain a space-delimited list of link types, so a two-word link type would not be understood correctly by conforming web browsers. (viz. rel="shortcut icon")In addition, older versions of Internet Explorer only recognised the favicon when the page was bookmarked, and failed to display when merely visiting it.
In 2003 the .ico format was registered with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) under the MIME type image/vnd.microsoft.icon, finally standardizing the filetype.[4] (This also means that the filetype image/x-icon is no longer correct.)
The Mozilla Firefox web browser added further support for favicons, in a way that conformed to web standards by, letting web designers add favicons in any of the following four graphics formats:
The following shows the correct format of link tags, using examples, for HTML and XHTML.
HTML:
<link rel="icon" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" href="http://example.com/image.ico"><link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="http://example.com/image.png"><link rel="icon" type="image/gif" href="http://example.com/image.gif">XHTML:
<link rel="icon" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" href="/somepath/image.ico" /><link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/somepath/image.png" /><link rel="icon" type="image/gif" href="/somepath/image.gif" />Unfortunately, Internet Explorer has a slightly different format.[2]
<link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" href="/somewhere/myicon.png">Most web browsers do not require any HTML to retrieve a favicon that conforms to the de facto file name and type (favicon.ico) located in the web site's docroot. If no favicon link is detected upon HTML page load completion and no previous site visits are recorded in the browser's history, a favicon.ico is requested automatically[5].
Additionally, such icon files should be either 16×16 or 32x32 pixels in size, and either 8-bit or 24-bit in color depth (note that GIF files have a limited, 256 color palette entries). Firefox is capable of displaying animated GIFs as icons.
Most web browsers have since added support for the new standard, and it is generally used for all new content.[citation needed] Firefox goes beyond the standard and will also work with image files in JPEG format (which has a MIME type of "image/jpeg").
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