On Sat, Jul 24, 2004 at 01:40:17PM +0000, wikitech-l-request@wikimedia.org wrote:

...

Seeing we want the ability to make printed material out of Wikipedia content, uploading full-resolution images is IMO the way to do it. However, such images currently break the image description page.

Suggestion: Have a magic word, __SCREENSIZE__ or something like that, which you can put on an image description page, and it will set style="width: 100%" on the image (thus telling the browser to size the image in such a way that its width fits the bounding rectangle). Of course, __SCREENSIZE__ should be omitted when the image is very small, because then "width: 100%" would tell the browser to enlarge it.

Of course, this isn't without problems. If someone's bounding rectangle is about 800 pixels wide (it's 826 for me at 1024x768 with Monobook) for someone, but 1000 pixels for someone else (possibly using 1280x1024), then one of them will want __SCREENSIZE__ to be inserted, while the other will complain that it enlarges the image unnecessarily. :/

This approach is fine for broadband users, but it doesn't help for modem users, who apparently can still be found in massive numbers (modems? haven't used one of those in years...) If we're going to shrink the image, we should shrink it on the server, rather than on the client.