I don't want to start another flame war, but why exactly do webmasters care so much? On one side you have webmasters unaware of the problem, they obviously don't care. On the other side you have webmasters who see that some non-existent file /favicon.ico is being requested a lot, don't like this, so they do 'cp /dev/null <webroot>/favicon.ico' or some similar operation. They are now serving up a 0 byte file so there is no bandwidth drag, and they aren't getting any error messages in their logs, and this took them less than 30 seconds so they no longer care. On the third side, you have people with personal websites that are hosted by a third party and have a domain like www.thirdparty.com/person'sArea/. Truth be told there is no more confusion generated for visitors by the fact that the site uses thirdparty.com's site icon then by the fact that the site's url starts with www.thirdparty.com and it is overrideable. By this logic, there is no good reason why any webmaster should care...???
Aaron Andersen wrote: > I was just about to write another long post about the favicon > incident, but since I really don't think that would do a whole lot of > good, I am doing something else instead. I have a question for the > developers and module owners who checked in automatic favicon.ico > requests in mozilla. > > What, if anything, can those of us who thoroughly hate this feature, > do to get it removed? > > Before this was implemented, several options were suggested by those > about to check it in. One was an evangelism situation, where if we > could get like 75 of the top 100 sites that used favicon to add link > tags pointing to their icons, automatic favicons would be turned off. > No real discussion was had on who would compile the list of sites, or > how many of them we would need to convert before we could get this > reversed. In another bug, someone said that this feature would be > turned on "until we get a storm of protests from webmasters." When I > (believing that such had already occured) asked for a clarification of > what "storm of protests" meant, I was told to "take it to the > newsgroups", and promptly ignored. Another time someone said that > this would be removed from 1.0 if it were the "consensus of the > community" to do so. Again, no one explained how it was to be > determined what the consensus of the community was. > > Like so many other things, we could probably sit here and argue about > this for months and never come to an agreement about what the "right" > thing to do is. But rather than argue about it, a lot of us would be > willing to go out put a lot of work into evangelism or whatever it > need be, if we had an agreement to get this removed were we successful > to some predefined degree. > > I'll repeat my original question, in case anyone forgot or wasn't > listening: What, if anything, can those of us opposed to automatic > favicon fetching do to get it removed? > > > Aaron Andersen > www.xulplanet.com >
