On 9/4/07, Christensen, Courtney ChristensenC@battelle.org wrote:
I know how to check the archives, but I'm not sure if this would even be there. What I am really curious about is why it was decided to go with using ImageMagick to resize images, rather than just changing the width attribute of the image?
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.