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An unexpected favicon request

solderpunk solderpunk at SDF.ORG

Tue May 26 18:23:29 BST 2020

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I found requests for favicon.ico from last week. Perhaps it's a web

proxy?

I would guess it's a Gemini client experimenting with the idea offavicons in Gemini, which have certainly been proposed. See, e.g.:

gemini://mozz.us/journal/2020-04-17.gmi

plus discussion elsewhere on this list (where somebody proposed using asingle UTF-8 encoded emoji as an ultralight favicon, which is a cuteidea).

Anyway, I set up my server to serve up a favicon.ico no matter where it's

requested (oh yeah, new feature to GLV-1.12556).

-spc (That shouldn't be a problem, right?)

Well, it's not really within the scope of the Gemini spec to explicitlyforbid things like this. If people want to write clients which do it,nobody can stop them. If people want to do it, I strongly encouragethem to make it an option the user can easily disabled. Some people,myself included, hold the "one request per page" principle in very highregard, so I probably wouldn't add this to a client of mine, even if Ihad a graphical one where it made sense.

I do grant that, as far as "secondary requests" not under direct controlof the user go, this is probably the least harmful kind possible, wherethe path is fixed and it goes to a server that the user has alreadyagreed to visit.

Cheers,Solderpunk