Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Wed, Sep 19, 2001 at 08:10:06PM -0400, Dave Spitz wrote:
> Ok, I have a third point. I noticed several posts about people redirecting
> dubious requests on to Microsoft. That's bad for two reasons, if it has the
> intended effect. One, it clogs the 'Net for everyone, not just Microsoft.
> Two, such activity hardly reflects positively on the moral disposition of
> people who do it. It's like complaining that you don't like being shot while
> deflecting the bullets to some other guy because you don't like him. How is
> that better?

In the case of favicon.ico, which was a solution looking for a
problem, poorly implemented, required a Windows-only file format in
order to work properly, and which caused the consumption of disk space
on /my/ servers, I don't have any qualms about redirecting those
requests.

First of all, favicon.ico was requested by IE (and still is) whenever
the user bookmarks a site. The file is expected to be found in the
root of the current URL's server, or relative to the current URL,
eg. if we're bookmarking

 http://example.com/some/dir/file.html

IE requests 

 http://example.com/favicon.ico
 http://example.com/some/favicon.ico
 http://example.com/some/dir/favicon.ico

If favicon.ico doesn't exist, that's 300 bytes (or more depending on
the IP, the User Agent string, etc.) that my logs have to absorb. For
example, from today:

63.109.119.35 - - [19/Sep/2001:15:07:00 -0400] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 
404 292 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt)"

And that's just one attempt to bookmark. On a busy site, it adds up.
I had one customer estimate that favicon requests accounted for 2MB a
day in error log entries.

If I wanted to provide IE with an icon to use in the spiffy bookmark
margins, I could /also/ use a custom HTML snippet, which is what MS
should have done and only done.

 <LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="/file/that/actually/exists">

Secondly, favicon.ico has to be a Windows-only file format, which was
a pain in the ass for Mac-based designers, who had to go find
Java-based apps online to convert their GIFs to Windows icons.

Thirdly, it costs us in bandwidth. Sure, it may be minor, but it's
still our bandwidth.

I thought it was an irresponsibly implemented "feature" then, and
I still do. So I redirect all favicon.ico requests either to a single
favicon file (which solves the crawling request path problem) or to

http://www.microsoft.com/fix/your/broken/browser/favicon/requests/are/filling/up/my/error/logs

It hasn't done any good yet, obviously, but I'm glad that somewhere,
some Microsoft logfile tech is having to buy more disk space. Maybe
s/he is also noticing how much disk is being taken up by these stupid
redirects, and notifying the appropriate people.

Then again, maybe not. I'm sure there's an "important customer"
somewhere who absolutely has to have IE act in the brain dead way
it does today.

Steve

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