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Comment by grenoire | Hacker News Reader

This is absolutely mortifying, how much metadata do pages have to share with browsers to do that one weirdly specific thing!?

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What weirdly specific thing?

You don't have to put anything in a head tag, you don't even need a head tag, but it's a good idea to have one and to at least add a charset meta tag. Everything is optional, though.

The entire point of it is for you to share metadata about your page with the browser.

My favorite weird thing that happens without certain <head> tags is the ten billion attempts to get a favicon. I don't know if browsers still try all those silly favicon requests if none is defined, but it was saddening to watch that grow to be wide spread previously.

Yes, they all still issue several favicon requests, so far as I'm aware. Having one, instead of returning a 404, can speed up the page load. Which makes 0 sense.

This is how I avoid this issue entirely:

    <link href=data:, rel=icon>

This is the smallest possible "null" favicon. It causes the browser to display nothing and ensures 0 HTTP requests for the favicon!

Does the browser display the generic "no favicon" icon, or is it just completely blank? I like the idea.

It's completely blank (tested in Firefox and Chromium).

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