Where to put favicon, other root assets?

[tylersticka]

The simplest method of including favicon.ico is in the root directory, which also avoids any 404 requests in the browser. Many static generators have an htdocs or static directory for assets that should be copied over verbatim. It would be nice to not have to specify <link> elements for this info.

[erikjung]

Perhaps we should include these by default:

• assets/static/favicon.ico
• the assets task, configured to copy assets/static/**/* to dist

[erikjung]

This relates to #40

[megnotarte]

No one seems to feel strongly about where this lives. If this gets too big, this doesn't necessarily need to make it into 1.0

[tylersticka]

Okay, I think I finally have an opinion on this. I wanted to share my "plan of attack" with @erikjung and @mrgerardorodriguez first before proceeding.

Directory Structure

I'm going to set aside for a moment the question of "is assets/ the right place for styles, scripts and/or images we plan on processing or compiling in some way?" That's a decent question, and I have opinions about it, but I realized it was getting in my way in terms of actually getting things done, so we should open a separate issue for discussion if we want to tackle that.

But in a perfect world, where would the static assets live?

For me, that's easy: ./src/static. It's simple. It's descriptive. It's pretty common. And unlike "assets," I feel like it implies that no processing will occur on those items. The definition of "static" is "lacking in movement, action or change." It's perfect.

I don't think it should live higher up in the structure than ./src. To me, ./src should really be where I live as a designer-developer. I want those files in there.

Gulp task

As noted in cloudfour/core-gulp-tasks#26, the "assets" task is kind of a mess. To recap:

• We have a directory called ./src/assets that, by default, contains only CSS and JavaScript.
• We have a task called assets that does not do anything with CSS or JavaScript.
• Said task includes imagemin, which is the largest dependency in the whole project.
• We do not currently use the image optimization in any of our projects.

I would like to replace that task with a task called static. It'll copy files from one directory to another directory. That's it.

If we ever want an image-processing task again, we should give it a name like images to match our css and js tasks.

Plan of Attack

If all of that sounds good, the next steps would be to...

• Is there an alternative to imagemin? core-gulp-tasks#26
  • Rename assets task to static
  • Remove image optimization stuff, including package.json dependencies
  • Update tests
  • Bump package version
• Where to put favicon, other root assets? #33 Make assets task registered and configured by default #40
  • Update core-gulp-tasks dependency
  • Add src/static/favicon.ico (good temp icon here)
  • Register and configure static task by default

But first...

Does all of that make sense?

[gerardo-rodriguez]

Works for me! 👍

[erikjung]

Can we just call the task copy instead of static since it could in theory be used on any directory?

Otherwise, 👍

[tylersticka]

Can we just call the task copy instead of static since it could in theory be used on any directory?

Sure, totally fine by me.