hakre - 6:31 am on Apr 27, 2006 (gmt 0)

thanks, i think sometimes my english needs to improve.

Is there any particular advantage/disadvantage to either of the two proposed linking methods?

the one is accepted by internet explorers ("shortcut icon") the other one by others (and by others in the future since this is not marked as depreceated). so the advantage is, that it is no problem to use both and keep in touch with upcomming implementations with ease. (i only hate that these are some more bytes in each request!)

in general you can use the link element to identify one favicon per html / xhtml document, so theoretically, you could change that on a per document basis.

Also, does the presence or absence of an explicit link in the markup make any real difference if the linked icon uses the standard favicon.ico name and is stored in the root folder?

the proposed points at the beginning (favicon.ico, root folder and link-tags) is just the combination of the whole to play safe. i can imagine for example that a useragent is not requesting the favicon if the link tag is missing. or an older browser request each time just in the root folder for a file called favicon.ico blindly but it would not if the tag exists. but maybe this could be part of a comparison chart which needs to be researched in that detail first.

and for answering this completely: you can use the link in the markup to use a favicon on another server/ other filename. just put [sample2.domain...] in it for example.

the "missing" profile looks like a small mistake in the w3 article only not to mention that it does not exists as file. [w3.org...] has more info about profiles, they even do not need to be retrieved at all, so it can be an URI "as is" only.