<story><title>How We Got the Favicon (2017)</title><url>https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/how-we-got-the-favicon/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>billti</author><text>When I&amp;#x27;m testing locally with a trivial site, those favicon 404 requests bugged me when checking the log. I&amp;#x27;m also a little bit obsessive about keeping my pages small. This resulted in me going down a rabbit hole of the GIF spec to see the smallest inline blank favicon I could create. I ended up with:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  &amp;lt;link rel=&amp;quot;icon&amp;quot; href=&amp;quot;data:image&amp;#x2F;gif;base64,R0lGODlhEAAQAAAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACASgAOw==&amp;quot;&amp;gt;
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Putting that small line in my HEAD tag gets rid of those annoying extra requests, and results in no favicon (it&amp;#x27;s just a totally transparent image).&lt;p&gt;If interested in the format, I put a gist up at &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gist.github.com&amp;#x2F;billti&amp;#x2F;81d4b601c9022ba3655a3a03873caff8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gist.github.com&amp;#x2F;billti&amp;#x2F;81d4b601c9022ba3655a3a03873ca...&lt;/a&gt; with the small node.js script I wrote to generate various examples. (You can see more examples and links in the comments in the top if interested).</text></comment>
<story><title>How We Got the Favicon (2017)</title><url>https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/how-we-got-the-favicon/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>neilv</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve never heard the definitive story of how autocomplete got added to the URL bar, but it might&amp;#x27;ve been a particular route from Emacs...&lt;p&gt;I was talking with a manager for one of the Web browsers in &amp;#x27;96, and mentioned a little Emacs add-on, &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.neilvandyke.org&amp;#x2F;webjump&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.neilvandyke.org&amp;#x2F;webjump&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt; , which combined Emacs autocompletion with a bunch of arbitrary site-specific code to be a smart hotlist&amp;#x2F;bookmarks&amp;#x2F;search&amp;#x2F;etc. for Web browsers.  The manager suddenly ignored everything else we were talking about, which I thought was more important, and drilled down into this little Emacs curiosity.  Next thing I knew, completion was added to their browser&amp;#x27;s URL bar (but not the other things WebJump did).&lt;p&gt;The autocompletion wasn&amp;#x27;t my invention (it might&amp;#x27;ve been Emacs&amp;#x27;s, decades earlier), of course, and a lot of people knew about it, including via noted Emacs hacker JWZ famously at Netscape, so there are numerous other paths it could&amp;#x27;ve coincidentally gotten into browsers.  I&amp;#x27;d just be slightly tickled if that one conversation happened to be the prompt for someone&amp;#x27;s effort to add it.</text></comment>