[FavIcon] Important to be .ico format?

Soldato
Joined
12 Jun 2005
Posts
5,361
Hi there,

I just wanted to know if it was important for fav icons to be in a .ico format because you can use a png and it seems to work in firefox?

Is it important for it to be in .ico format? Does it have advantages?

Thanks...
 
Soldato
OP
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12 Jun 2005
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Augmented said:
Wider support, and favicon.ico is what may applications will look for in the root by default when attempting to get your site's icon.

Does that mean I do not have to link it in the head of the HTML....or should I still link it?
 
Soldato
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18 Oct 2002
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Conrad11 said:
Does that mean I do not have to link it in the head of the HTML....or should I still link it?
Yes, do link to it - that way you'll support both applications that automatically search for it, and those that look for a <link> in a page's <head> :).
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
12 Jun 2005
Posts
5,361
Augmented said:
Wider support, and favicon.ico is what may applications will look for in the root by default when attempting to get your site's icon.

Sorry to bring this up again, so that means it's best to put it in the root directory, yes?

What do you mean by root directory, in the same folder as the index page?

Thanks...
 
Soldato
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Cambridge
Beansprout said:
If you don't put it there you'll be surprised how clogged your logs get with 404s, mainly from IE :eek:

Funnily enough I noticed this ages ago. It's very annoying if you don't actually want a favicon; does anyone know of a way to get round it somehow?

arty
 
Man of Honour
Joined
31 Jan 2004
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arty said:
Funnily enough I noticed this ages ago. It's very annoying if you don't actually want a favicon; does anyone know of a way to get round it somehow?

arty
'touch favicon.ico'

I create favicons and 404 pages by default since it's astounding just how much of the log files are crap.

Look at this, and this is only 6 days:

Code:
grep favicon.ico /var/log/httpd/error_log | wc -l
  24101

And for non-existant 404 pages:

Code:
grep '404.shtml' /var/log/httpd/error_log | wc -l
  66062

Out of a total number of file not found errors:
Code:
grep 'File does not exist' /var/log/httpd/error_log | wc -l
 264625
That's just insane - nearly 35% caused by no favicon/404 :eek:
 
Soldato
Joined
11 May 2004
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4,790
Location
Gloucester
For widest support it's best to use two different link elements.

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

Only one is the "standard" way of doing it, but browsers that implemented it before the standards were finalised use the other method.
 
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