O death, where is thy vespiary?
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Here's another half-baked Vole standard
THIS PARTICULAR Inq hack has always admired that neat little icon – the favicon – which appears next to the INQ site whenever you view its URL – having already bookmarked the site.
Emulating the Inq and creating our own favicon turned out to be a very bad idea indeed. There's no sensible testing procedure.
Inq stalwarts will know that the Inq favicon disappeared briefly at various points during the site's history and this experience probably explains why.
The Vole created the favicon facility in the first place but never seemed to think the whole thing through properly.
The device's name stems from its original purpose – to place an icon next to a particular booked marked web site. Which is Volespeak translates into saving the site's URL back to 'Favorites.' So it's a 'Fav icon' – Geddit?
The practice has, however, been widely emulated and the Inq couldn't find any particular browser – Firefox, Opera, Safari, you name it – that doesn't support the favicon.
Naïve readers – like this hack – had assumed that creating the favicon was merely a question of taking a carefully crafted logo and shrinking it to fit. Oh, no. It's far from being that easy.
For starters, you've got a choice of potential formats. Either 16 x 16 or 32 x 32 pixels but there's no guarantee the higher resolution format will work for everybody. Also it's a jolly bad idea to attempt to go above 256 colours. Oh, joy.
Now here's another little gem of information. The resulting icon should be named 'favicon.ico' to work efficiently. But what format should it be created in initially?
Save yourself a great deal of pain and anguish and save it in a Windows bitmap (.bmp) format if you want to remain sane. Then, rename it afterwards.
Ok. Now where do you place the favicon.ico file on your own web site? The instructions naturally refer to the 'root' directory but if, like the most of us, you're not quite sure what your ISP regards as being the root directory, it's best to add an extra bit of code.
Try this … <link rel="shortcut icon" href="images/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">. That should tell the browser where to find the favicon.
The truly brave can also modify this code to give the favicon a different name. It's also possible add code to encourage IE 5.0 users to save your URL to their favorites, so that the favicon will actually appear.
Now here's the clincher. Just you try testing this out. Once Explorer has actually found a favicon, it won't search for a new one until you clear the cache and the history – and delete the shortcut.
That's because the Explorer browser won't search for a new favicon once it's found one. How crazy is that?
There's bound to be several clever-clogs who possess a super-duper favicon icon generator that reduces the complexity of creating the file in the first place.
But what ever happened to the icon generator that used to a be a standard part of Windows? Did it die out after 3.3? Why should you need a Visual Basic editor for such a simple task?
The favicon is a neat idea but leaving the Vole to set the standard is proving a very bad idea completely. µ
Tags: Microsoft
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Why can't you just create or resize your icon in GIMP and save it as an ICO file?

It's easy as entering 'favicon.ico' as the file name when you're saving and GIMP will automatically choose the ICO format. Don't bother compressing it.

The matter hardly warrants an article on a news site. Not in 2008, anyway.
Its like this because IE interchanges regular windows shortcuts, and URL shortcuts... which are just windows shortcuts in a specific folder.

You dont need any special tag, just place favicon.ico in the root of the site and you're done.

If you don't like the site's icon for itself, or they didnt bother to make one, you can give it a different one from your hard drive just by accessing the shortcut's properties. Thats very useful.
http://www.favicon.co.uk/

or 

http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/

or

http://www.webscriptlab.com/favicongenerator.php

or

http://www.favicongenerator.com/

or

http://www.favicon.cc/


the list goes on.
Seams this journalist is a bit slow.

Of course it works that way, sheep. I'd try to explain, but that'd be a waste of time.

Remember the guy who went around his elbow...
Yes, there are a few bits of HTML (and CSS) that seem to have been bodged somewhat. Things like the conventions surrounding web forms are pretty nasty in some ways. Unfortunately backwards-compatibility to the HTML 4 and below days when not all the browsers really understood the standards and made up their own as they went along has a lot to answer for.

And now they can't make web forms sane without breaking various shopfronts.

Compared to that malarkey, the favicon thing is OK, though I do think Microsoft could get rid of the dumb caching.
I hate favicons. The tend to be really rather ugly and turn your bookmark lists in a disgusting patchwork mess. Fortunately, there is a tweak in Firegiraffe that allows you to disable them completely - you can enter the following into user.js:

user_pref("browser.chrome.site_icons", false); 
user_pref("browser.chrome.favicons", false);
Claimer: I have no interest in this site, I'm just reporting the news.

You can upload a regular graphic file and have a complete multi-format icon generated by going here: 

http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/

I expect they use ImageMagick or something like that under the covers, but it really beats a lot of alternatives.
Thanks for wasting 30 seconds of my life.
Your website still sucks. Let me fix it.
.. love the end user usefulness of favicons, allows saving of all my usual websites without text cluttering everything up. 

Oh, and a major pain is IE won't let you save a favicon shortcut with no text label. 

Which is no problem for me. Firefox rules etc...
More modern code/image format would be... 

<link rel="icon" href="images/myicon.png" type="image/png" />

Safari and Firefox support it great, but I can't get it to work with IE7. Big surprise.