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.