I just found out that lots of Android devices will letterbox icons; the
latest version of Lighthouse will preview an icon in the safe clipping
range, and that range was way too small for my existing icons. I made a
new version that was mask-safe with the white foreground shrunk down a
bit so it would fit. See [0].
[0]: https://web.dev/maskable-icon-audit/
For consistency, I renamed the Apple mask icon as well.
Why are there so many extensions to the HTML standard for icons? This is
getting ridiculous.
It's time for a rant about icon standards. Let's recap! what icons do I
have so far?
- A 192px apple-touch-icon. Apple icons are supposed to be 180px, but
192px gets re-sized down just fine. This used to be apple-specific but
then Android and others started using it. I picked 192px instead of the
standard 180px because we need...(next bullet)
- A 192px icon for Android devices. Rather than having a separate icon
for this, I just re-used the existing Apple icon in case the user's
browser wants both so it can just cache and re-use it.
- The original 32px favicon.png. I picked PNG instead of ICO because an
ICO containing the optimized PNG was a whopping 2kb while the png was
176 bytes. It looks fine when scaled down to 16px with a variety of
automatic downscaling algos, so there was no need to include an extra
16px version.
- A mask-icon. I was hesitant to implement this since it seemed very
vendor-specific (desktop Safari only), but it somehow became an
accepted registered extension to the spec [1] so I figured that it was
only a matter of time before a bunch of other things started using it.
- A webmanifest file to describe even more icons. It re-defines the
aforementioned 192px icons. I chose to re-use the icon for the same
reason as before. It also describes the next two bullets:
- favicon.svg: used in the manifest in case the device wants something
bigger than 192px.
- A maskable icon (svg), completely unrelated to the aforementioned
mask-icon, with the focus of the image shrunk down to handle cropping
e.g. on some Android devices.
[1]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics.html#attr-link-sizes
What I SHOULD have, in an imaginary world where web standards make sense:
- A 32x32 raster icon. Probably PNG, but lossless-webp migth work
too.
- A 16x16 raster icon, only if the 32x32 version doesn't downscale
well.
- An svg icon for any other resolution.
What I don't, and probably never will have:
- A msapplication icon for IE 10 on Windows 8.0, for adding sites to the
Windows 8 Start Screen.
- A browserconfig.xml in my site's root directory for adding sites to
the Windows 8.1+ Start Screen/Menu with custom icons.
Since MS dumped IE and switched to Edge, documentation for the above was
never updated. I don't run proprietary operating systems, so I can't
test adding a website to the tiled Start Menu or Windows Task Bar.
Now that MS re-wrote Edge as a Chromium-based browser, I really have no
idea how it handles icons; I'd imagine it just does what Chrome does,
but it probably does some odd witchcraft to support adding sites to
Start or the taskbar. Docs don't seem to exist. Until they update the
docs, I'll assume that adding MS icons would mean supporting a
non-standard IE-specific feature.
Due to its simplicity, my site should render fine in browsers going as
far back as IE5; it even works in KHTML. But there are some lines I
won't cross: it'll probably *render* on IE5 but it won't *load* since
https://seirdy.one is TLS 1.2/1.3 only. And it won't support special
proprietary non-standard extensions.
WTF we're almost at 80 lines. I should've just written a blog post.
- The old icon was too off-center; improve it.
- Add a mask icon
- Replace deprecated apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png with
non-precomposed icon.
- Cache-bust all icons
Android, iOS, and other browsers use the pseudo-standard
"apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png"; android recommends 192x192px and iOS
downscales to 180x180px.
The sight of an animal using a JavaScript captivates Computer Scientists
and laymen alike, perhaps because it forces us to question some of our
ideas about human uniqueness.
Does the animal know how JavaScript works? Did it anticipate the need
for the tool and select it instead of Haskell or Zig?
To some, this fascination with JavaScript seems arbitrary and
anthropocentric; after all, animals engage in many other complex
activities, like Agile Planning and ordering Juice on the Internet.
However, we know that complex behaviour need not be cognitively
demanding.
JavaScript development can therefore provide a powerful window into the
minds of animals, and help us to learn what capacities we share with
them — and what might have changed to allow for the incontrovertibly
unique levels of technology shown by modern humans, such as integers and
block scope.
