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

[Martin Atkins]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> 
> Using media queries for this is serious overkill. I can easily imagine 
> uses for this that are from code that doesn't have a media queries 
> implementation available, and this isn't something that implementors are 
> going to implement media queries for. We need a solution that is easy to 
> adopt from the implementation point of view.

Fair enough.

> That isn't to say that media queries shouldn't be allowed, though, and if 
> people use them then they should work, if the UA supports them.

Would it not be better to explitly say that media queries are not 
appropriate for this, for interoperability?

> 
> I don't really agree with the premise that we somehow need to be frugal 
> with attributes. We should use them when they are appropriate. Sure, we 
> shouldn't waste them, but they're not a resource in scarce supply or that 
> has some insane cost to them.
> 
> Note that we already have a DOM attribute on <link> that is specific to 
> one rel type, namely "disabled".
> 
> In fact, generic attributes are a pain in the neck. Consider "title", 
> whose behaviour changes radically if we're talking about rel=stylesheet 
> versus something else.
> 

In general I agree that attributes are not a scarce resource, but if you 
need to add use-specific attributes to a supposedly-generic element I 
think that indicates that the generic element is inappropriate for the 
use-case.

I don't know what link rel type uses "disabled", but I would have had 
the same objection to that.

If the meaning of "title" is something different for stylesheets than 
for other link rel types then that was an inappropriate use of that 
attribute as well. It's too late to change it now, but that's no reason 
to continue overloading generic elements/attributes with special cases.

link is also interesting in that unlike <input type="..."> rel can 
contain several values. Is it conforming to use width and height 
attributes on a link element that contains both "icon" and a another, 
non-icon keyword?

What about <a rel="icon" ... width="..." height="..."> ?

Finally, what is the process for contributors to the RelExtensions page 
to include extension attributes?

>>
>> <link rel="icon" type="image/gif; width=24, height=24" href="...">
>>
> This doesn't really work because we would need to add parameters to types 
> we might not yet know. It also results in potentially complicated parsing 
> rules, which I don't think people would get right. (See the comments I 
> made for media queries.)
> 

Presumably this would be defined (if at all) for everything under 
"image/", just as "charset" is defined for everything under "text/". (In 
theory, at least.)