[Techtalk] Icon editor

James jas at spamcop.net
Fri Sep 20 16:07:02 EST 2002


On Fri, 20 Sep 2002, Dan Richter wrote:

> 
> >What do you mean, IE doesn't support .png images? I didn't think IE 
> >supported anything that would change their icon. The spamcop site uses a 
> >.ico file, but it doesn't have any effect on my IE (5.5).
> 
> Ah, I understand now. In IE, the icon only has an affect on your bookmarks 
> ("favorites"). If it's a .ico file, the icon will be used as the icon in 
> the "favorites" section. But in Mozilla, the icon is used in the tab 
> (Mozilla has a handy "tabbed" interface), and is ignored in the bookmarks. 
> (Mozilla accepts .png images too, not just .ico.) Presumably [LINK 
> REL="shortcut icon"] was originally a Microsoft extension, but Mozilla 
> decided to support it along with [LINK REL="icon"]. (While Microsoft and 
> Netscape both have a sad history of inventing their own ridiculous 
> proprietary extensions, note that the use of the LINK tag was never clearly 
> defined or limited.)

That's the idea; the reference to IE "not supporting PNG" is that IE 
doesn't support PNG files *as icons* (i.e. in favicon.ico).

This may be a result of IE ignoring the HTTP content-type field and 
relying on the "extension" instead (thus assuming the PNG file is in ICO 
format) - ISTR by default the browser uses /favicon.ico from that site as 
the icon? Using an explicit LINK tag to, say, icon.png may overcome this: 
anyone tried it? (I don't have a Windows machine handy...)


James.




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