Well, the future is here -- Apple is now shipping a laptop with a
high-resolution 2880x1800 screen ("MacBook Pro with Retina display"),
optimized for a sharper display at traditional screen sizes. I have one
here on my desk and oh, is that screen beautiful. :)
We can reasonably expect such displays at laptop sizes to trickle down to
other models and manufacturers over the next couple years, starting with
power users and moving down to generic consumer machines. They're already
standard on many smartphones and some tablets.
For now, MediaWiki takes limited advantage of high-resolution screens. In
supporting browsers, text renders beautifully, but icons and images are
low-resolution and can look blocky or blurry like in this image:
<
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/mediawiki/a/a3/SF_infobox_in_lo%2C_mi…
Sharper maps and diagrams like this will be nice in content, but we have to
fix our user interface images too!
Some general guidelines for anybody working on code that includes icons or
images:
* where possible, always create assets as SVG and generate the PNGs from
the scalable original
* INCLUDE THE SVG IN SOURCE CONTROL!
* If SVG isn't suitable (say for a photo), create a double-size version
even if you're not ready to use it yet.
We'll develop some best practices about how to switch in high-res versions
and whether it's better to use the SVGs or double-sized PNG rasterizations.
You don't need to use them now, just make sure the images are there when
we're ready to use them.
If your code includes PNG or GIF assets that were made from SVGs but you
didn't store the SVGs in source control, please try to find them and add
them -- otherwise you or someone else will have to recreate them at some
point. If you used a non-SVG format like Illustrator, slap those in -- they
can be converted later.
Some older images don't have source versions (or were made pixel-by-pixel)
and will need to be redrawn.
-- brion "living in the future" vibber
