[javajosh]

Good argument - unless the href length approaches the size of the resource itself!

I don't understand what you're saying about the utility of the favicon with HSTS. It's not something I'm expert in, so perhaps I'm missing something? What does "push browsers to load them" mean?

[toast0]

If you want to tell browsers that your whole domain (*.example.com) should be https only, you need them to load something from the top level domain (example.com), they're loading is hosted on (say www.example.com or news.example.com). Any resource from https://example.com/ can serve an HSTS header with includeSubdomains, but it might as well be the favicon.