Apple Touch and Favicons

Published 2020-04-17

I have a shortcut for portal.mozz.us that I added to my iPhone's home screen. It sits alongside my native gopher app (the one by Charles Childers) and a shortcut to the Gaufre gopher-web proxy.

=> https://portal.mozz.us | gopher://forthworks.com/1/iOS/gopher | https://gopher.commons.host

I use this shortcut to check that my server is still running, and to quickly look for new updates on other gemini servers. Because it's so convenient I end up clicking on it once or twice every day.

Anyways, getting to the point, I added an apple favicon link to the portal.mozz.us HTML header.

This resulted in a much nicer looking picture on my home screen. I have no way of knowing if this also works for Android, but my limited google searching seems to indicate that "yes it should".

=> Before Screenshot | After Screenshot

This got me thinking... should gemini use favicons? I like the simplicity of the old web style, plop a favicon.ico file in the root of the web server and let clients autodiscover it. I think it could be a fun idea that wouldn't complicate the specification at all.