Favicon

A favicon (short for favorite icon, Eng. Fav icon ) is a small, 16 × 16 or 32 × 32 -pixel icon, symbol or logo that is displayed as in the address bar of a browser to the left of the URL and are most frequently serves to identify the associated website on recognizable way. The favicon also appears in the list of bookmarks ( favorites), at the tabs and windows when you save a page on the desktop. It was introduced by Microsoft with Internet Explorer 5.

Integration into an HTML page

There are now two ways to integrate a favicon in a page:

If one uses XHTML instead of HTML, so must a trailing slash at the end of the day are, since this is an empty XML element. Mandatory needed and usually only the href = attribute; the type = attribute is required only if other formats are used as. ico. The following codes must be used for the following formats:

  • For ICO: image / x -icon (not very widespread another possibility: image / vnd.microsoft.icon )
  • For GIF: image / gif
  • For PNG: image / png

Standard sizes and color depths:

  • For ICO. 16 × 16 or 32 × 32, and 16 to 16.7 million colors
  • For GIF and PNG:. . 16 × 16 and 256 colors

File Format

The file format ico is a container for image data. It can take a lot of pictures in different resolutions that are stored in uncompressed bitmap (or from Windows Vista from a resolution of 256 × 256 pixels as PNG).

Interactive favicons

As a demonstration of the French web developer and designer Mathieu Henri developed a game that uses the favicon as a display area. The small remake of the arcade game Defender is written in JavaScript. The code generates each frame of the game in the Favicongröße (16 × 16 pixels). It is then converted to a PNG.

Uniform Resource Locator Computer icon Defender (video game)
327576
de