Rephrase icon section (to help curb icon proliferation)

[j9t]

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/links.html#rel-icon

Motivation: Favicons, bookmark icons, OS and UA tiles proliferate, with around 50 known sizes in the wild and a lot of confusion among authors (and full lack of solid data) what to use when and where. Yet there’s a common need (for an icon representing respective site or app) and a viable solution (a vector graphic, for example, that can be used as such an icon in the majority of use cases).

The specification is hinting at this situation and how it could be addressed (“an icon representing the page or site”) but ends up contributing to said proliferation:

1. Language: Although the spec first uses the singular suggesting one icon could address the assumed needs, the spec the veers off to address several sizes, several formats, and formats containing several sizes.
2. Examples (or example): The section example uses 5 icons geared towards 9 sizes.

While the spec may not be able to undo history to curb the number of solutions that emerged for basically the same needs, it may be able to curb further excesses.

Suggestions:

• Use the singular, in spirit of the introductory “an icon representing the page or site.”
• Use an example employing just one or two icons, to demonstrate how icon can be used in a more economic fashion.
• Recommend, if in the spirit of the documentation as a whole, to avoid the invention of new ways (markup, names, sizes, formats, &c.) to obtain pretty much the same icon-like representations of a site or app.
• Amend this part of the specification to eventually address and join the different trends to recommend one, two, or at maximum three graphics in the site root, like, for example, favicon.svg, favicon.png for a first fallback, and favicon.ico for a second fallback. (This is partially addressed but this idea aims at nudging software and authors along a more narrow channel that could serve most needs.)

There are probably other ways of describing and addressing the situation but anything may be welcome at this point to contain the excesses around icons we now observe.

[j9t]

@annevk, @domenic, I’m feeling free as this is an old report: Has this topic been considered yet, or could it be considered, to help improve the situation around favicons?

[annevk]

I think we would accept a PR that adds an example for how to use an SVG icon with a sentence that says that this suffices for the majority of use cases.

But I'm not sure I agree that the situation is unfortunate. There are drawbacks to vector graphics, especially at smaller sizes.

[j9t]

I missed the response! I’ll prepare a light PR for further discussion.

[j9t]

Made one small but perhaps naive suggestion with #6954.

[j9t]

PR #6954 has been updated to only make small copy and example tweaks.

Issue #6957 builds a first case for a favicon.svg fallback.

[j9t]

Closing this one in favor of aforementioned #6954 and #6957.