[WikiEN-l] Re: Thumbnails, varying connection speeds

[Delirium]

Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:

> I'm not sure that thumbnails are the ideal answer, though, because 
> they're very annoying for those who _do_ have high-speed connections. 
> I wonder whether it would be unreasonable to request that Wikipedia 
> support two (or three?) flavors of delivery, chosen in 
> Preferences--high graphics, thumbnail graphics, and perhaps no graphics?

Perhaps an additional possibility would be to have things be more 
relative.  Right now there is a default size, but it's not usually used, 
because it seems to be smaller than what most people are using.  But 
hard-coding pixel values is a bad idea, because peoples' monitors and 
preferred reading sizes and so on vary, so they really should be 
relative somehow.  And once we have a relative coding scheme, it's easy 
to add an option that says "show me all images 50% smaller".

The main problem I see with making thumbnails smaller all around is that 
really small thumbnails are often pretty useless, often not any better 
than simply a text link to the full-sized picture, because you can't see 
anything on the tiny thumbnail.

-Mark