Re: Decisions on Bugs

[Christian Persch <chpe stud uni-saarland de>]

Hi,

On Sun, 2003-12-21 at 16:49, David Adam Bordoley wrote:
> Osma Ahvenlampi writes: 
> 
> > On Sun, 2003-12-21 at 03:14, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> >> > http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=116678
> >> > Favicon support 
> >> 
> >> I think this should be NOTABUG. 
> >> 
> >> - Of the two specs one is definately better then the other
> >> - Causing 404 on servers isnt really a nice idea
> >> - It's not unreasonable to expect more and more servers to
> >> follow the new spec
> >> - The lack of favicons for some sites is not a critical problem
> > 
> > I want to point out that favicons are a usability improvement - being
> > able to see which window is which from just the titlebar, window list or
> > desk switcher icons is a boon for anyone like me with lots and lots of
> > windows open. 
> > 
> > So forgive my strong language, but block-headedly insisting on a spec
> > that isn't followed by 98% of Internet users, and as a result, 95% of
> > web site owners, is hurting usability here. We're not lacking favicons
> > for "some sites", but most of them. Of my 1200 bookmarks, about 20 show
> > favicons in Ephy. 
> > 
> 
> I somewhat agree with this setiment. Does IE support the "new spec"? If it 
> doesn't than the new spec is essentially worthless. I realize this is a 
> chicken and egg problem and in an ideal world everyone would follow the 
> spec, but in the reality this is just going to make normal users perceive 
> epiphany as an inferior browser to IE because it doesn't support icons that 
> seem to work in that "other browser." 
> 
> This is not to say we shouldn't encourage use of the new spec, but not 
> supporting a widely deployed pseudo-standard is only going to hurt us in the 
> short term. 

Some info about IE favicon support from
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/Author/dhtml/howto/ShortcutIcon.asp :
- it does support the <link> thing (although with a non-standard rel
attribute, "SHORTCUT ICON" instead of "ICON". gecko understands both
variants)
- it only _displays_ the favicon in the address bar [and bookmarks menu]
when the user has bookmarked the page
- it only supports .ico files apparently

It's clear to me that the www.example.com/favicon.ico was never meant to
be fetched unconditionally for every page on the host; and I don't think
we should do that.

I vote NOTABUG too.

Regards,
	Christian