favicon not appearing

What browser are you using? Some don't display them at all (think mainly older ones), some will only display the icon when the site is bookmarked.

-Greg

Are you using a meta tag to display it?
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/PATHto/IMAGE.ico">'

This should get it as long as you've saved an ico image.

or you can just name it as:

"favicon.ico" and put it in the root folder, like they told you to

I thought that I HAD done that, Kyle, but I obviously didn't/don't understand.

What IS the "root directory" ?

The root directory is the main web browsable directory. When you go to yourdomain.com/favicon.ico does it come up?

What browser are you using?

http://www.zerocattle.com/favicon.ico for example.

Thank you Karen and Suzanne,

Yes the icon does appear. You can verify that by clicking on the link to my site at the top of my posting/s.

When I click on the link to your icon, I see just the icon as expected. When I go to your site, the icon is not displayed before the URL. I would have expected it to be. It was, however, added alonside the listing when I put it in Favorites.

At home I have IE6 on XP Home.

The icon is, as I said before, in htdocs on the server. That is what I have understood to be the root directory, or folder.

Why, Karen, should a meta tag be necessary? Favicon.co.uk don't mention that.

Greg, and everyone else,

Yes I have just found out that bookmarking it, or renewing the bookmark on another computer here at work, makes the icon appear okay, both in IE address box and in the Favorites list.

Thank you all for your input.

IE has a VERY weird favicon behaviour... always had. if you can't find an obvious mistake, try another browser like mozilla and see if it works. if it does, blame it on Microsoft's implementation.

Quote: Why, Karen, should a meta tag be necessary? Favicon.co.uk don't mention that.

I do it this way because this is how I learned to do it. I don't know if it is the absolute best way, but it seems to work for me. Not all browsers look for the ico in the same way.
Here is an explination of the ico meta tag from Dan's Web Tips

Quote: Tells the browser where to find an icon to use in conjunction with the page in bookmark lists, the URL bar, etc. While MSIE automatically looks for "favicon.ico" in the root directory of your site (which some webmasters find annoying if they have no desire to use an icon and don't like getting lots of "404 Not Found" errors in their log), some other browsers, like Mozilla, are more considerate and only look for an icon if it's explicitly linked. The link needn't be to a file named "favicon.ico"; you can call it anything you want and put it anywhere. Mozilla even supports icons of different types (e.g., JPEG graphics), though MSIE only supports the Windows icon format. Mozilla allows the rel attribute to be "icon" (or any phrase containing "icon" as a word), while MSIE looks only for "shortcut icon". Technically, a link attribute with multiple words is saying that the link is of multiple types, with each word being a different type identifier, but I think the Microsoft programmers were just clueless enough to think that spaces could be used within type names, and that "shortcut icon" is what they think the type is.

The only thing I might suggest is don't use anything but an .ico image... IE won't see anything else.

btw: did you get this sorted out?

*Edited to add* I notice that your icon is showing up in Safari for me. I'm not sure how the newest browsers are looking for the ico image. I wish I had an all encomasing list of how each browser does it (like my css list). If you're not concerned with having it work in older browsers, it looks like you may have it now.

Okay Karen, thank you.

Then I shall add a tag in the headers of the Index page and any others which I might give a direct link to.

I sorted it out here at work by deleting the bookmark and coming back to the site then re-bookmarking it. The icon appeared in the list immediately but I had to go to another site and come back yet again to mine before it appeared in the address bar.

I did something similar at home but can't remember the exact sequence.

I haven't been to this forum for...well...too long. So I visited today and the first thing that I read was this. That is my problem exactly! By reading all of these posts it works now for me!

Thank you thank you!