[XML-SIG] favicon in XBEL

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

On Friday 30 July 2004 09:15 am, Ahmad Gharbeia wrote:
 > Storing and handling book marks in a cross platform/browser format has
 > been a long time interest for me. Only when I started thinking of
 > undertaking the task myself in XML that I found your work, which I greatly
 > admire.

Thanks!

 > Allow me to bring one suggestion to your attention:
 > Why not add the ability to store an encoded 'favicon', or a URI to it in a
 > <bookmark> element?

This has been discussed before, and is of interest to the Konqueror crew as 
well.  I'll have to dig back in my archives to see what was said.

 > Now the fact that the de facto standard for favicon format is MS .ICO
 > doesn't help much in displaying web sites icons in HTML generated from
 > XBEL, although nothing prevents browsers such as Firebird from displaying
 > icons in other formats that it supports in the address bar.

That seems like a really minor detail.  The icon will be whatever the website 
provides if it uses a <link> element to identify the icon; favicon.ico is 
just what gets used if you don't care to use an open format.

XBEL, of course, shouldn't care about that.  If you want an icon that can be 
exchanged along with the XBEL document, and displayed from XHTML generated by 
an XSLT transform, you can always load the icon (in whatever format), convert 
to a convenient, open format (I'll suggest PNG), and embed the icon into the 
XBEL document as a data: URL.

I guess the favicon URL could just live in an attribute called favicon.

Are there any other missing features from XBEL that should be added for XBEL 
1.2?  Two things I found when checking my archives were:

1.  Specify how URLs should be encoded in XBEL.
2.  Some sort of merge/include feature.


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>