2009/4/24 Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com:
That's what occurred to me. In that case, the only possible thing to do seems to be to just have the image request wait until the image is thumbnailed. I guess you could show a placeholder image, but that's probably *less* friendly to the user, as long as we've specified the height and width in the HTML. The browser should provide some kind of placeholder already while the image is loading, after all, and if we let the browser provide the placeholder, then at least the image will appear automatically when it's done thumbnailing.
There was a spec in earlier versions of HTML to put a low-res thumbnail up while the full image dribbled through your dialup - <img lowsrc="image-placeholder.gif" src="image.gif"> - but it was so little used (I know of no cases) that I don't know if it's even supported in browsers any more.
http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/images/_IMG_LOWSRC.html
- d.