On Fri, 5 Nov 2004 15:38:06 -0500, Jamie Bliss <astronouth7303(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I believe that the Image namespace only works
correctly with straight
web-image files (gif, png, jpg). You may want to use the Media
namespace insted.
Yes, [[Image:Foo]] doesn't do anything with thumbnails, it just
generates the HTML to include that picture at that position. So if you
give it a .xls file or whatever, the user's browser will request that
file, and try to display it in the middle of the page (obviously, not
what you want).
Using [[Media:Foo]] instead will create a link directly to the file in
question; or, if you want to use the image description pages (which,
again, are only really designed to work with images, so may look a bit
odd), you can use [[:Image:Foo]] - the leading ":" turns it into a
textual link to the description, rather than including the image.
As for making a "thumbnail" that looks like the standard .xls icon,
there isn't currently a way to do this; but there is a planned feature
to let users specify a manually generated thumbnail, so you might with
the next version of the software be able to use something like
[[Image:Foo.xls|thumb=xlsicon.png|Spreadsheet showing really
fascinating stuff]]. Still rather hacky, and the "image description"
page will still look weird, but it would probably look how you're
expecting on the page.
Perhaps while we're thinking about better multimedia support (e.g.
sounds, videos) we should think about building a more generic
file-upload system? [see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/Multimedia for the
current discussion]
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]