Re: Favicon for (each) public-inbox

[Eric Wong <e@80x24.org>]

Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org> wrote:
> Eric,
> 
> Would it be possible for the Public-Inbox to provide a simple
> Favicon(*), either for the whole site, or in someway for each
> in-box?

For people running the PSGI themselves, yes, it should 404 so
Plack::App::Cascade (or similar) may be used to fallback to
serving as a static file.

On my server, I have an empty file in favicon.ico so it is
served as a 200 (using Plack::App::File or similar).  This
reduces HTTP requests since favicon-requesting clients tend to
try repeatedly on 404s but not 200s.

> I've added the git public-inbox to my firefox bookmarks as "GitPI"
> (neat eh.), but all I get for the Icon part is a dull grey world. A
> bit of colour would be nice.

I'm afraid having any sort of icon for public-inbox itself would
be a bad representation of the project itself which strives to
be graphics-free and discourage the use of graphics (especially
for branding/marketing).

It seems every image rendering library has been affected by
nasty security bugs in recent years and I'm trying to get users
to reduce their attack surface (and save bandwidth!) by using
non-graphical browsers.

Fwiw, my slow response has been the result of having poor
connectivity the past few days.

> --
> Philip
> 
> (*) I didn't even know what they were called until I searched to see
> if I could customise the Icon. The Mozilla help pages tells me 'no',
> it comes from the source...
> https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1097942

Ideally, you could patch/hack your browser easily.  I will do my
best to make the public-inbox code easy-to-hack/customize/run,
at least.  I'm extremely picky about UI; mainly, it's _user_
interface, and should be decided for and by a particular user,
not some UI developer.

I've managed without icons for years.  As somebody with bad
eyesight and hearing, I find touch + muscle memory (keystrokes)
the best UI.