1. As long as you put the favicon.ico file in the root of your site, it should be picked up by browsers even if you don’t add those link strings to your pages.

2. You can use animated gif files as the favicon! Just call them favicon.gif and make sure you replace “ico” with “gif” in the strings.

They will only animate in certain browsers, like Firefox, though. But you can overcome this issue with ease, by using something called conditional comments. Put the regular ico link string between conditional comments to be picked up by Internet Explorer, and the gif link string before it to be picked up by Firefox and other browsers.