[whatwg] <link rel=icon width=

[Smylers]

Ernest Cline writes:

> > ... 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
> 
> Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but why wouldn't:
> <link rel=icon style="width: 16px; height:16px"> 
> serve to mark width and height adequately?

* The style attribute says _how_ to display something, not what that
  something _is_.  The above says: "Ignore the icon's intrinsic size and
  scale it to 16 x 16."

* CSS is optional, so browsers shouldn't be forced to use it to find out
  some meta-data.  And if a user had elected to turn off CSS for
  displaying in pages, would a browser still be permitted to use it for
  this purpose?

* Nested attribute syntax is more awkward and error-prone than having
  width and height directly on the element.

> It's even perfectly fine HTML 4 syntax.

Why is that interesting?  If it's syntax that current browsers already
do something useful with then that's a big point in its favour; but if
it's something which is currently a no-op then that it happens to be
syntactically permitted in an older standard doesn't seem like a benefit
over any other syntax which browsers currently ignore.

Smylers