[whatwg] <link rel=icon width="" height="">

[Michael(tm) Smith]

Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch>, 2008-04-30 01:52 +0000:

> The Gears team has an API that allows authors to specify a set of icons:
> 
>    http://code.google.com/apis/gears/upcoming/api_desktop.html
> 
> They used a scripted API, but when I tried to get them to use a 
> declarative API, they said that the main reason they used a scripted one 
> is that the declarative options didn't have a way to specify dimensions.
> 
> This is a proposal to add "height" and "width" attributes to <link> 
> specifically for the case of rel=icon, so that authors can provide 
> multiple icons and let the UA decide which to use based on their size 
> (without having to download them all to find out which is best).

I notice the docs for the "icons" param of the Gears createShortcut()
method describe four discrete sizes that all have the same height
and width ("An object containing one or more of these named
properties: 128x128, 48x48, 32x32, 16x16...").

So do UAs expect link at rel=icon icons to always have the same
height and width, and if so should the HTML5 spec make it clear
that their height and width should be the same?

If link at rel=icon icons in practice actually always have the same
height and width, it seems like just adding just "size" attribute
(e.g., <link rel=icon size=32 ...>) could achieve the same effect.

Or if we wanted to really get declarative, I guess another way to
do it might be to have an "icontype" (or whatever) attribute with
an enumerated list of values that describe the intended purpose of
the icon (instead of its size). So, icontype=favicon or
icontype=desktop -- or whatever terms describe what the various
(de facto) standard sizes of icons are used for.

Or if not that, maybe the value should just be an enumerated list
of size names -- e.g., small, medium, large, x-large.

  --Mike

-- 
Michael(tm) Smith
http://people.w3.org/mike/
http://sideshowbarker.net/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 2237 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/attachments/20080430/cc8515a8/attachment-0001.bin>