You know those little icons that show up in the address bar of a web page? And then later stick around when you bookmark the page? Which Shiny Things doesn’t have (yet)? They’re called “favicons”. They were introduced by Microsoft to enhance the experience of using Internet Explorer.

Originally they were placed in the root folder of a web site; the browser would automatically look their for the icon. Nowadays there’s a special HTML tag that the site can use to tell the browser where to find the icon.

The icon also used to be just a Microsoft BMP file in a special format… now some browsers can handle JPEG or PNG files as well.

If you ever want to make a favicon file, there’s a very handy web site at http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/ which can take regular graphics files and create a proper favicon.ico file for you.

You can also read more about them at Wikipedia.

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