Page thumbnail

The idea to assign a thumbnail to the page.

The problem

To get a thumbnail (screenshot) of the page, we need to use some 3rd party services, such as Alexa, Snapcasa etc. Problem is that they are too slow. These services add request of the thumbnail to the queue so you are unable to get the thumbnail of the page instantly. What's more, you become dependent on them.

Use Case Description

• Page thumbnail in the search results
• Thumbnail in various community sites (such as [1])
• Link submit sites, like [2]
• WEB browsers to display thumbs on home page or bookmarks
• Any other websites, that needs to display thumbnail of the page.

Proposed Solutions

My Solution

Solution would be to add new type of link tag. As we know, to indicate the favicon of the page, we need to use the following code:

<link rel="icon" href="favicon.ico">

We could use similar code to add the name of the page thumbnail. Proposal would be to use the following code:

<link rel="thumb" href="thumb.png">

Having this tag in the page and screenshot of the page in file called thumb.png, we propose that we have thumbnail of our webpage and want other services/applications to use it.

Problems

Abuse

There might be a problem, that people will start to abuse this tag. For example, they could upload picture, which is not related with page at all, and say that it is the thumbnail of the page.

Every website would have to generate thumbnails

Every website would have to generate thumbnails of their pages, which wouldn't be any easier than just websites that need thumbnails doing this.

Adoption

This solution would make a lot easier for developers to add thumbnail of the page function to web sites.

IFrame solution

Add an attribute to the IFrame tag to make it act like an image of the page.

<iframe src="http://www.example.com/" static />