From: Timwi timwi@gmx.net
[snippages]
It seems that a lot of people have begun to make thumbnails excessively large. For visitors with low resolutions, 350px is a *lot* ...
[snippages]
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 wrote:
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?
Perhaps an additional possibility would be to have things be more relative. Right now there is a default size, but it's not usually used, because it seems to be smaller than what most people are using. But hard-coding pixel values is a bad idea, because peoples' monitors and preferred reading sizes and so on vary, so they really should be relative somehow. And once we have a relative coding scheme, it's easy to add an option that says "show me all images 50% smaller".
The main problem I see with making thumbnails smaller all around is that really small thumbnails are often pretty useless, often not any better than simply a text link to the full-sized picture, because you can't see anything on the tiny thumbnail.
-Mark
--- Delirium delirium@rufus.d2g.com wrote:
Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
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?
Perhaps an additional possibility would be to have things be more relative. Right now there is a default size, but it's not usually used, because it seems to be smaller than what most people are using. But hard-coding pixel values is a bad idea, because peoples' monitors and preferred reading sizes and so on vary, so they really should be relative somehow. And once we have a relative coding scheme, it's easy to add an option that says "show me all images 50% smaller".
The main problem I see with making thumbnails smaller all around is that really small thumbnails are often pretty useless, often not any better than simply a text link to the full-sized picture, because you can't see anything on the tiny thumbnail.
-Mark
Well users can always disable photographs in their browser settings. I think it would be hard to administer a system with different size images for different people. (another thing is that people on dialup would try to format the article to look good on their version with the small image, and people on broadband would revert, and many edit wars might result)
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Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:
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'm not sure I can follow you. Why is a 100px thumbnail more annoying than a 350px thumbnail if the full-size picture is >800px anyway?
Timwi
Timwi wrote:
I'm not sure I can follow you. Why is a 100px thumbnail more annoying than a 350px thumbnail if the full-size picture is >800px anyway?
Well, mostly because in the 100px thumbnail you can't actually *see* anything. =]
-Mark
Delirium wrote:
I'm not sure I can follow you. Why is a 100px thumbnail more annoying than a 350px thumbnail if the full-size picture is >800px anyway?
Well, mostly because in the 100px thumbnail you can't actually *see* anything. =]
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "anything". Certainly you can see whether the picture depicts a person, a building, a bridge, or whatever. Together with the thumbnail caption, it should give you an idea of what it is (e.g. "Alan Turing", "Golden Gate Bridge", "UN Headquarters", etc.). So if you're interested in it, you click it to see the big picture.
Timwi
Timwi wrote:
Delirium wrote:
I'm not sure I can follow you. Why is a 100px thumbnail more annoying than a 350px thumbnail if the full-size picture is >800px anyway?
Well, mostly because in the 100px thumbnail you can't actually *see* anything. =]
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "anything". Certainly you can see whether the picture depicts a person, a building, a bridge, or whatever. Together with the thumbnail caption, it should give you an idea of what it is (e.g. "Alan Turing", "Golden Gate Bridge", "UN Headquarters", etc.). So if you're interested in it, you click it to see the big picture.
Yeah, I hadn't really thought of that. That serves a different function then. In the 350px case it serves the function of an accompanying image illustrating the article, which you could optionally click on to get a much higher-quality image if you desired, but in most cases don't need to unless you have a particular interest in that picture's contents. In the 100px case you pretty much have to click on it if you really want to see it.
-Mark
Delirium wrote:
Timwi wrote:
Delirium wrote:
I'm not sure I can follow you. Why is a 100px thumbnail more annoying than a 350px thumbnail if the full-size picture is >800px anyway?
Well, mostly because in the 100px thumbnail you can't actually *see* anything. =]
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "anything". Certainly you can see whether the picture depicts a person, a building, a bridge, or whatever. Together with the thumbnail caption, it should give you an idea of what it is (e.g. "Alan Turing", "Golden Gate Bridge", "UN Headquarters", etc.). So if you're interested in it, you click it to see the big picture.
Yeah, I hadn't really thought of that. That serves a different function then. In the 350px case it serves the function of an accompanying image illustrating the article, which you could optionally click on to get a much higher-quality image if you desired, but in most cases don't need to unless you have a particular interest in that picture's contents. In the 100px case you pretty much have to click on it if you really want to see it.
Well, most of the images are 200px, and it seems that the thumbnail feature uses about 200px as a default. So let's talk about that, rather than 100px which I guess is indeed quite small. Is 200px large enough for you? I can certainly see the pictures of the UN Headquarters well enough at that size.
Timwi