Re: Steps to creating a browser standard for the moz-icon:// scheme

On Jan 29, 2010, at 10:29 AM, Pierre-Antoine LaFayette wrote:

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> 2010/1/29 Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ) <ifette@google.com>
> 2010/1/28 Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
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> On Jan 28, 2010, at 8:39 PM, Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ) wrote:
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>> It's interesting to note that on most modern OSes (Mac OS X, Vista, Win 7 ...) the OS actually does create a pre-computed high quality icon for many files, e.g. images, PDF, Word, Photoshop, .... It is almost free to get this from the OS, and the OS also has 3 default sizes for it. It would be great to provide access to this if you have a File handle to it.
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> Mac OS X has 5 default sizes and can reasonably efficiently interpolate sizes in between. On the other hand, iPhone OS doesn't have any file icons, or even a really user-visible concept of files. So I'm not sure we can make too many assumptions about what will hold across platforms.
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> Regards,
> Maciej
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> Sure - there are some platforms where it may not be available (including perhaps winxp?). But it's an interesting idea to expose these if they are available, and if they're not available, then fall back to some default.
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> Perhaps if we found some creative commons icons to use as defaults for the most used extensions. It wouldn't match the native theme but at least we'd have something for cases where platform icons are not available. We'd need to have some number of sizes. I think Windows goes to a max of 72x72, while Mac OSX goes to 128x128. Mozilla defines the size as:
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>    *   Parameter:   size
>    *   Values:      [<integer> | button | toolbar | toolbarsmall | menu | dialog]
>    *   Description: If integer, this is the desired size in square pixels of the icon
>    *                Else, use the OS default for the specified keyword context.
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> <integer> scales the icons to the desired size. I think we'd at least need a few different sizes for a default set of icons. I'm not sure that such icons exist.

I don't see a need to standardize anything solely for use by extensions. What we should ask is which icons are useful for Web content, since that is where we have the interoperability constraint. Extensions do not currently interoperate between different browsers, nor is this planned as far as I can tell, so they cannot be the sole use case for any part of a Web standard IMO.

Regards,
Maciej