zetawoof wrote:
This decision probably predates the existence of this mailing list, and it probably wouldn't have been discussed anyway. As source images can be significantly larger than the displayed image - editors often upload raw digital camera output, for example - using the width attribute would seriously inconvenience both the user (who would have to download the full-size image) and Wikimedia (who would have to provide bandwidth for these downloads). Quite honestly, there's almost never a good reason to set a width/height attribute different from the image's actual dimensions.
And people was uploading the images repeated in low-resolution to cope with it.