Re: 3d favicons

On Mon, Aug 20, 2018 at 5:35 AM Rik Cabanier <rcabanier@magicleap.com>
wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 19, 2018 at 9:17 AM Florian Bösch <pyalot@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I'd favor making it possible to target the favicon with a canvas
>> directly. As in:
>>
>>> <link id="icon" rel="icon" type="image/png" href="..." animated="True">
>>> <script>
>>>   window.onload = function(){
>>>      var icon = document.getElementById('icon');
>>>      var ctx = icon.getContext('3d'); // or 2D
>>>      ...
>>>   }
>>>  </script>
>>
>>
>> That way you can put in anything you want (even video) at any speed you
>> want (realtime if so desired, or slower), with any technique you want (2D
>> canvas or 3D canvas).
>>
> How would you make it 3d? It seems that would require script to run...
>

Correct, a script would need to run.


> I don't think this approach will work though as the favicon is not part of
> the DOM and can be rendered when the document isn't even loaded (ie for
> bookmarks). I suspect such a change will be hard to specify and implement
>

It's my impression that the majority use-case for an animated favicon is in
the tab when the web page is open (running a script also allows the page to
interact live with the icon, so that's an additional benefit). For
use-cases which cannot execute scripts (like bookmarks) they'd use the
fallback image provided.

I suppose you'd object to running a script everywhere a favicon can be
displayed mainly on performance concerns (who wants to run like say 200
scripts on a bookmark overview page or somesuch?). But if that is the main
objection, then animated 3D favicons everywhere are out no matter how you
do them. Unlike static (or even moving) images, which have well defined
performance characteristics, 3D content can easily be made to consume any
amount of computing resource (for instance make a favicon with 10 million
triangles).