The icon is used by the Apple iPhone OS and iPod touch software to add a web site shortcut to the Home screen. The benefit of creating an apple-touch-icon.png file is that the icon displayed for the site is defined by the web site owner rather than a thumbnail of the site content generated by the mobile device.

Aside from the benefit of a user-friendly icon, adding the icon can also clean up your web server logs. If you have HTTP status 404, file not found, entries in your access log:

visitor.example.com - - [01/Aug/2009:19:00:00 -0700] "GET /apple-touch-icon.png HTTP/1.1" 404 1024 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3"

Then it is likely that you have visitors that want to save your site on their mobile device.

With increasing support, more sites are being designed with web fonts. However, many web servers are not providing the correct MIME type for these files.

For the Apache web server, the following configuration in an .htaccess file will provide the correct MIME type for web fonts:

AddType application/vnd.ms-fontobject .eot
AddType application/octet-stream .otf .ttf

The AddType directive for Apache supports multiple file extensions and the values are case-insensitive.

Web fonts are typically one of three file types:

• OpenType (.otf)
• TrueType (.ttf )
• Embedded OpenType (.eot)

For many common file types found on the web, there is a dedicated MIME type defined. That is not the case for some font file types. Both OpenType and TrueType files do not have assigned MIME media types.

There is an assigned MIME type for Embedded OpenType (.eot) files: application/vnd.ms-fontobject

The MIME type application/octet-stream is used is to indicate binary data that does not have a more specific, assigned MIME type. In practice it is often used as the default MIME for binary, non-text data that should be downloaded to a file. See RFC 2046 for more details.