Paul James has come up with a novel alternative to Gravatars. Favatars are another way to quickly see who made which comment without having to find and read their name and to also give the poster an identity. This has value for a Web publisher because it will help to create a sense of community around his website, as people see small elements of personalization reflected when they leave a comment or interact in some way with the site.
James’ idea is to extract the favicon graphic from the commentor’s URL using regular expressions to obtain the URL to the author’s favicon graphic. That URL is then used in an IMG tag to display the favicon next to the author’s comments.
