How to Add a Favicon to your Site

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

A favicon is a graphic image (icon) associated with a particular Web page and/or Web site. Many recent user agents (such as graphical browsers and newsreaders) display them as a visual reminder of the Web site identity in the address bar or in tabs. The wikipedia includes an article about favicons [FAVICON-WIKIPEDIA].

To add a favicon to your Web site, you'll need both an image and a method for specifying that the image is to be used as a favicon. This document explains the method preferred by W3C for specifying the favicon. There is another common method that is illustrated below, with an explanation of why that method is inconsistent with some principles of Web architecture. Both methods only apply to HTML and XHTML, one of the limitations discussed below.