The Favicon, an Untapped Image Promotion Trick -
Animated Favicons?
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Andrei_Smith]Andrei
Smith
A favicon is that little image that most browsers display on
the address line and in the favorites (bookmarks) menu.
Tabbed browsers like Firefox and Opera extend the
functionality of favicons, adding them to their tabs. The
name was coined based on Internet Explorer (the first
browser to support it) and derives from "Favorites Icon".
Each web browser has a unique user interface, and as a
result uses the favicon in different ways. The favicon allows
a company to further promote its identity and image by
displaying a logo, a graphical message, etc. Often, the
favicon reflects the look and feel of the web site or the
organization's logo.
A traditional favicon is actually a Microsoft Windows ICO
file. An ICO file is actually a repository of bitmap like
images. They are used because in some locations a 16x16
pixel image is desired, and sometimes a 32x32 image may
be needed. Sometimes a 16 color image is desired, and
sometimes a 256 color icon is desired.
You probably already knew all of the above.
But did you know that Firefox can display animated
favicons? If you don't believe me, open Firefox and go to
my site, bsleek.com (there should be a link at the bottom of
the article). if you don't have Firefox, download it, it's a
"must have" and you will quickly fall in love with the
simplicity and convenience of tabbed browsing. Even if you
are not a designer but just a site owner, in today's
environment you absolutely must know how your site looks
in all browsers. You would think that all websites should
look the same, but as browsers become more diverse and
more sophisticated, standards are not respected and things
can get messy. For example, I just discovered that a few
pages on my site don't look as expected in the latest version
of Opera and need to be adjusted.
Ok, I hope by now you saw my animated favicon in Firefox
and came back to the article to learn more about it...
The main reason why you can see animated favicons in
Firefox is because Firefox abolished the proprietary ICO
format in favor of the ability to display any supported image
format in the favicon location, including BMP, JPG, GIF,
PNG and... animated GIFs.
So now you know the big secret, the animated favicon is
nothing but a tiny animated GIF.
Here's a very neat trick, that can actually be used to
visualize how any image looks like as a 16x16 pixel icon -
once you start designing one of those, you will realize that it
is extremely hard to produce a legible image on a 16 square
pixels canvas:
Find any page with any graphic that you are interested in.
Right click the image and chose "View Image" from the
dialog. A blank page should display with your chosen image
and surprise: you can see a miniature 16x16 copy of the
image as a favicon! Uhh... do I have to mention again that
we are doing all this in Firefox?
A hacker's mind will immediately think of how great it
would be to use this feature as a conversion tool.
Unfortunately, unlike Internet Explorer and Opera, Firefox
doesn't store FavIcons in .ico files, the icons are stored in
an encoded format directly in the bookmark file.
You can apply the same principle to animated GIFs and you
will notice that a miniature version of the animation also
plays in the address bar and on the tabs.
Perhaps one of the main reasons why you don't see that
many sites using animations is browser compatibility.
Animated favicons are not treated at all by Internet
Explorer. A static image will not be extracted from the
animation either. Instead, the default .htm icon (as defined in
Windows' filetypes) will be placed under one's Favorites -
once added, that is. The animations are not supported by
Netscape, Opera, Konqueror, Safari; at least so it seems at
the time of this writing. The Firefox family seems to be the
only friend to animations, yet as browsers evolve, broader
support for animation will probably come along (or, the
concept will die).
So, why not take advantage of this *now* and 'beat the
rush'?
Basically, this is how it's done:
1. You make a 16x16 animated GIF.
2. You upload the animated GIF to the "root" of your site,
or to any other location.
3. You hardcode in your page the location where Firefox
should look for the animation.
That's really it, "big picture" wise.
If you don't feel too creative or just don't have time and/or
patience, a reputable professional design firm (such as
Bsleek) should be able to make a nice animated favicon for
you. Another option - I don't endorse it, as your goal should
be to excel through unique content and push your own
image out there - is to find one of the many galleries online
and either download a ready made animated favicon or take
a large animated GIF and resize it and/or edit it in one of the
many available tools. There also are sites that offer online
animated favicon creation from a standard image (check out
chami.com, find "FavIcon from pics", they have a simple but
neat scrolling text feature).
If you are however a fellow do-it-yourselfer, then let's
elaborate and look at some techniques and useful tips:
As far as tools go: If you are a lucky owner of Adobe's
excellent Photoshop, then you also have a companion
application called ImageReady. Linux users have Gimp, an
incredibly powerful and free graphics application that can
easily handle animated GIF creation. What many people
don't know is that Gimp is also available for free for
Windows and the Mac. There is also GIMPShop in the
wild, which is a nifty GIMP version for the
photoshop-inclined audience (did I mention free?). There
are also many specialized GIF animation makers, some
freeware, some not.
Things to remember when designing animated favicons:
You have control over the number of times your animation
will play. Any decent animated GIF editor will ask you
whether you want your animation to play once, several
times (you specify a number) or forever. It is also important
to know that after the animation cycled the predetermined
amount of time, it will remain still on the last frame (not the
first one!), so make sure that frame contains the image you
want displayed at the end of the cycle.
If you really need to, you can set it to loop continuously.
However, out of curtsey to those paranoid about their
computer resources being eaten alive by your animation and
to those who find animated things in general terribly
annoying, I always recommend that you set up a finite
number of times your GIF will cycle through the animated
sequence. 6 sounds like a good, conservative number, 12 is
on the medium side.
By limiting the number of times your GIF plays, you might
even set a cool viral marketing effect, where visitors will just
click through your pages to see the animation start over. I
clearly remember when I first saw an animated favicon
years ago (on the first iterations of the Mozilla browser), the
animation was set up to cycle once, and I found myself
refreshing the pages over and over, and even clicking
through the site just to see it again and again. I don't care
what anyone says, people are attracted to eye candy.
So you made your animation and are very proud of it. Now
it is time to upload it to your web server. You can put it
anywhere you want, in any folder you desire. The old
school webmasters who follow Microsoft's teachings will be
very much appalled by this statement. They will tell you that
if you don't name your icon favicon.ico and if you don't put
in the very root of your site, it will not work. With Firefox
and animated favicons things are very liberal, you can name
your animation anything you want (.gif) and place it
anywhere you want. You just have to place a special tag on
every page that points to the gif.
Here is the big problem: All this works fine in Firefox, but
what about the rest of the browsers?
Well, for maximum compatibility you'll have to make a
regular favicon.ico and upload it to the root of your website
(that's where your very first index.xxx home page is, where
xxx is htm, html, php, cfm, etc..). Then we'll add the
following two lines of code to every page that you want to
pull and display the animation.
Please remember to replace the "{" and "}" brackets with
the standard HTML ones, "". I had to use the curly ones
here in order not to confuse article sites. The code has to be
placed between the {HEAD} tag and the {TITLE} tags. It
might possibly work otherwise, but your HTML code will
not be fully W3C compliant:
{LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON"
HREF="http://www.mydomain.com/favicon.ico"}
{LINK REL="icon"
HREF="http://www.mydomain.com/favicon.gif"
TYPE="image/gif"}
Of course, replace "mydomain.com" with your own domain,
favicon.ico is a standard favicon, favicon.gif is your newly
created animated GIF. Again, it can as well be
mydomain.com/somefolder/somename.gif.
Always hardcode the location, use absolute addresses (as in
the example) and not relative ones ("../favicon.gif").
The first line of code is a standard, a-la Microsoft command
that tells the majority of browsers to load a standard
favicon.ico.
The second line of code is for Firefox only, instructing the
browser to load the animated version.
As a side note, if you forgot to add the two lines of code to
a page, that page should pick the default favicon.ico, but
only if you already loaded it via one page that had the code
in it, or if the page was bookmarked. Additionally,
sometimes, Internet Explorer will just refuse to show a
favicon...
If the above sounds strange (if it doesn't, what are you
doing reading my articles??), I talk about how to create a
favicon.ico and about some of the favicon's stranger
behaviors in my other related articles. Just Google for "The
Favicon, an untapped image promotion trick" (with quotes).
One last thing: I feel that this article will not be complete if I
don't support those folks who look at the animated favicons
the same way the world looks at the text blink "feature"
from the early nineties and would like to forever wipe it of
the face of the web.
You can disable favicons - animated or not & site icons in
Firefox. Here's how:
Open a Firefox window. Type "about:config", without the
quotes, in the address bar. Hit enter or click Go. Scroll
down slightly to "browser.chrome.favicons" and double
click it to change it to "false". This gets rid of the favicons. If
you also want to stop seeing site icons, then look right
below for "browser.chrome.site_icons", double click it to
change it to "false". Close all Firefox windows. When you
reopen Firefox, the pesky little icons should be gone.
---
Andrei co-owns [http://www.bsleek.com/promo]Bsleek - a
company that specializes in web design, hosting,
promotional items, printing, tradeshow displays, logos, CD
presentations, SEO and more. Andrei has amassed an
extensive technical knowledge and experience through his
career as the CIO for a major travel management company
and through his past careers in military research, data
acquisition and airspace engineering. He also consults for
[http:/www.trinityinvestigations.com]Trinity Investigations, a
New York based PI firm.
--- [http://www.bsleek.com/websites/]Bsleek Web Design
- If we build it, they will come.
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http://EzineArticles.com/?The-Favicon,-an-Untapped-Image-Promotion-Trick---Animated-Favicons?&id=153883
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