On 9/4/07, Christensen, Courtney <ChristensenC(a)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.