[WikiEN-l] Re: Thumbnails considered annoying

[dpbsmith at verizon.net]

> From: Timwi <timwi at gmx.net>
> 
> 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'm not sure I can follow you. Why is a 100px thumbnail more annoying 
> than a 350px thumbnail if the full-size picture is >800px anyway?

Not to advocate, just to explain what I meant. 

There is a pretty good visual correspondence between a halftone color printed 
image and a screen image. The screen image is about 80 dpi, a color halftone 
image is often rendered with a screen of around 133 lpi. Same ballpark, and 
closer in quality than the numbers might indicate because of moire effects in 
the halftone, superiority of additive (screen) vs. subtractive (printed) 
color mixing--but I digress.

What I'm saying is that a 300-pixel-wide image is frequently good enough to 
serve as a satisfying encyclopedia article, and is a good match for (say) a 
three-inch-wide image in a print encyclopedia, both in page layout and in 
amount of visual detail. For a lot of purposes, e.g. portraits of authors, 
Presidents, etc. 300 pixels wide seems "about right". 100 pixels is too small 
to serve as a reasonable illustration. And a picture that's say, 800 pixels 
wide is likely to be around 600 to 1200 pixels high and take up a lot of the 
screen... it's the screen equivalent of a full-page plate, to be used rarely.

So, I'm asserting that if you were just going by screen appearance alone, and 
weren't considering download speeds, you'd probably end up making most 
pictures around 300 pixels wide.

Now, I'm viewing this all very selfishly, from the point of view of a DSL 
users. DSL has the curious characteristic that, compared to dialup, download 
speeds are fast, but turnaround speeds aren't that much faster than dialup. 
And there are other latencies, maybe in Wikipedia's servers, maybe elsewhere. 
What this means is that a) if I download two typical Wikipedia pages, one 
with a 300-pixel-wide image and one without, the time it takes me to get the 
page is a) distinctly nonzero for either page, b) about the same for both 
pages. That is, it takes a noticeable, slightly annoying time to get the 
page, and _I'd just as soon get the full image at the same time as I get the 
page_ because it doesn't change the speed noticeably.

On the other hand, with a thumbnail, I have to click on it, I have experience 
a _short but annoying delay_, I experience a sort of interruption in the 
ludic flow of the reading experience, and I see the image separately, no 
longer in the context of the article.

I'm sure this is far, far less annoying than it is for a dialup user to watch 
an image that he/she doesn't particularly care about seeing paint slowly from 
top to bottom.

I'm just saying that what's optimum for a low-speed user creates a slightly 
degraded experience for the higher-speed user.

One size does fit all--but not comfortably.