Favicon, icon, shortcut icon, apple-touch-icon: Are there any others?

Question

I know of 2 basic kinds of default web icons for websites:

• Favicon: place an .ico formatted file at the root of your site named favicon.ico and most desktop browsers will find it and display it in various contexts (bookmarks, tabs). Can also be added in code, which allows you to specify other names and other graphics types to the file, though there are type and size limitations for browsers:

  <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" />
  <link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" />
  

• Web Clip Icon: place a png formatted file called either apple-touch-icon.png or apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png at the root of your site and iPhone OS/iOS versions of Safari will pick those up and store them when the site is added to the Home Screen. Can also be added with code like:

  <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/custom_icon.png" />
  

Are there any other default icon graphics for a website a webmaster can include?

Answer 1

It appears based on this and this that Android will use the rel type of apple-touch-icon-precomposed or apple-touch-icon, BUT that for it to work you need to use a fully qualified url, e.g.:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed"
      href="http://www.example.com/custom_icon.png" />

or:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon"
      href="http://www.example.com/custom_icon.png" />

The caveat is that this seems to be for Android 2.1 update 1 & Webkit 3.1. The Android developer documentation does mention a method in android.webkit that is event when the apple-touch-icon is retrieved.

Answer 2

This depends on which platform you target. But i think most - standard compatible - mobile browsers understands the default favicon tags. Maybe you can search for special use cases (e.g. create desktop shortcut with a special icon) on platforms like Android, iOS, WebOS, ...

I've just developed a few websites targeting on iPhone Users and on this sites I used Wordpress with a specialized version of the WPTouch theme.