From: Timwi timwi@gmx.net
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It seems that a lot of people have begun to make thumbnails excessively large. For visitors with low resolutions, 350px is a *lot* ...
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Also, it makes the files pretty large. 14KB doesn't sound large to DSL people, but on ISDN it would take 2 seconds to download on maximum speed. Add to that the fact that Wikipedia isn't always at maximum speed, and that many people don't even have ISDN!
This is a good point. It's astonishing how quickly one forgets. Just four years ago I was still on dialup and was using a machine with an 80 megabyte hard drive, and was just flabbergasted when people would casually suggest sending me an .mp3 file that was "only" three megabytes. When I barely had ten megabytes to spare on my hard drive, and didn't really feel like spending half an hour on a download. I also remember the Apple Worldwide Developers' Conference in 1996, when Apple, and many companies, were on T1 lines--and many people and companies were not. The answer to every question was "oh, we have that on the web." I was stewing, because my _home_ machine was 56 kbps--and at _work_ the only Internet connection was a 28 kbps dialup. I didn't say anything, but finally someone raised his hand and said "Please remember that in Japan most of our modems are only 2400 bps and we pay about $20 per hour to connect."
A few weeks ago we helped a friend install the critical security patches--just the CRITICAL security patches--for her Windows XP laptop over a dialup connection. Jeez, what _could_ Microsoft be thinking of? They probably think everyone is on a T1.
I've had DSL for about three years afraid I've gotten in the habit of thinking that 30K to 50K is a reasonable size for pictures. Once I've have had (a GUI/a high-speed connection/a CD-R drive/whatever) for a few years, I begin to feel that everyone really ought to have them and I stop taking the needs of those with less technology seriously.
I'm not sure that thumbnails are the ideal answer, though, because they're very annoying for those who _do_ have high-speed connections. I wonder whether it would be unreasonable to request that Wikipedia support two (or three?) flavors of delivery, chosen in Preferences--high graphics, thumbnail graphics, and perhaps no graphics?
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Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@world.std.com alternate: dpbsmith@alum.mit.edu "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/