Apache and favicon.ico file

[Ian Zimmerman]

Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www.servers.unix

Excuse this completely trivial question - search engines are not helping.

I noticed that when I copy the file manual/images/favicon.ico from the
httpd tree into the root of my web documents space, I get the Apache
feather icon in the browser location bar. But I could not find any
mention of this feature in the httpd manual, so I don't know for
instance if other file formats are acceptable; and I don't know what
tool I could use to save my own icon in the same format. GIMP seems to
offer saving images as .ico files but the output of the "file" command
is different:

# file /usr/share/doc/apache2-doc/manual/images/favicon.ico
/usr/share/doc/apache2-doc/manual/images/favicon.ico: MS Windows icon resource - 2 icons, 32x32, 16-colors

# file ~itz/albumart.ico
/home/itz/albumart.ico: MS Windows icon resource - 1 icon

[Eli the Bearded]

Post by Ian Zimmerman
Excuse this completely trivial question - search engines are not helping.

You are asking the wrong question then. I find this very quickly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon

Which has this table of contents:

1 History
1.1 Standardization
1.2 Legacy
2 Browser implementation
2.1 File format support
2.2 Use of favicon
2.3 How to use
2.4 Device support
2.4.1 HTML5 recommendation for icons in multiple sizes
3 Limitations and criticism
4 References
5 External links

It is probably a good start to understanding favicons.

Elijah
------
generally uses them to avoid seeing the inevitable 404 errors