On 31 August 2012 19:45, Isarra Yos zhorishna@gmail.com wrote:
On 31/08/2012 08:57, Brion Vibber wrote:
Heck yes. Generate some standard sizes at upload time and let the browser scale if a funny size is demanded. Modern browsers scale photos nicely, not like the nearest-neighbor ugliness from 2002.
As a graphist, I must say this does not seem like a good idea. Only rendering certain sizes and having the browser then scale the weird ones will still result in fuzzy images, because no matter how good the renderer, every time a bitmap image is scaled down, sharpness is lost. This is part of why there is so much emphasis placed on using vectors even in a static environment - with those, the first scale down is also avoided, and there is a very visible difference in clarity even there. But while only rendering certain sizes and then having the browser scale those would defeat that purpose, having to scale down bitmaps twice would look even worse, regardless of subject.
-- -— Isarra
A possible scenario where a human intervention is always needed is generating icons from svg files that draw flags or ..icons.
A 16x16 pixels USA flag rendered from a SVG by some naive rescaling (mipmaping?) will look worse than wrong. Perhaps you still want to have this icon generated from or inspired by the SVG file. In videogames this sort of problems are sometimes solved by having all the scaled versions precalculated in a single file: mipmaps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mipmap
Modern videogames uses other more advanced techniques, but the beauty of mipmaps is that can be artist edited (perhaps the artist can edit the 16x16 pixels version to still make sense.