Team Ravenglass

We had some fun with this seemingly simple problem today. Setting up a new web site, we found that the "favicon" graphic (the little icon that show up next to your page's URL or title in a browser tab or address bar) was working for all browsers but Internet Explorer (IE).

It turns out that IE is very particular about the way that the favicon must be set. The graphic must be of type "ICO". While other browsers support GIF, JPG, and PNG icons, IE requires ICO.

Next, a reference to the icon must be included in the section of your HTML document, using the tag. The tag must have the attributes "rel", "type", and "href" set to the values "SHORTCUT ICON", "image/vnd.microsoft.icon", and the full URL (including http:// and your domain) to the ICO file.

For more information, see the following links:

• Wikipedia entry for Favicon
• Favicon validator to determine where favicons may be found for a given web page.
• Favicon ICO generator to convert existing icons or other files to valid ICO format icon files.

This entry was posted on May 6, 2010 at 1:43 PM and has received 405 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.