[whatwg] <link rel=icon width=

Mon May 5 10:28:37 PDT 2008

-----Original Message-----
>From: Anne van Kesteren <annevk at opera.com>
>Sent: May 5, 2008 5:27 AM
>
>On Sun, 04 May 2008 02:38:03 +0200, Ernest Cline  
><ernestcline at mindspring.com> wrote:
>> Perhaps, but it means adding attributes to <link> elements that will  
>> only be needed for a single link type.  If the use case for these  
>> attributes is strong enough to add special purpose attributes for use  
>> with only <link rel=icon> then I dare say that it is strong enough to  
>> have a special purpose <icon> element so as to keep user agents from  
>> having to deal with nonsense such as <link rel=stylesheet height=32  
>> width=32>
>
><icon> would not be backwards compatible. In some user agents (at least  
>Opera and Firefox) that would imply a <body> element for instance.

Would making <icon> an optional content of <title> break backwards compatibility?  The incompatibility problem you mention comes from the start and end tags of both <head> and <body> being optional.  That isn't the case for title and it makes sense syntactically to place it there as the icon is part of the identifying information for the document.