On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 12:45 PM, Trevor Parscal tparscal@wikimedia.org wrote:
So, what we should be doing instead is deprecating the image size, type and style properties in exchange for a new semantic system where images are identified as primary, figure, aside, etc. (names are just examples). We can support both for a long time, and eventually drop support for the old properties. We could also interpret common sets of properties within certain thresholds as equivalent to semantic names, either on the fly or as a mass conversion change.
I support this goal. Some wikis have already made small steps in this direction with templates. {{Largethumb}} is used, for example, to get a second "standard size" for thumbnails. The template-based solution is not terribly compatible with VE.
Right now the only "semantic" markup is using thumb without a specific image size, which works for landscape-format images only. Moving to a square bounding box helps encourage broader use of markup without specific image sizes, which furthers the long-term semantic goals.
But I'd also be interested in seeing a concrete counter-proposal for semantic markup. Presumably from the Visual Editor UX perspective, this is just a drop down labelled "Style", along with (presumably) some discouragement of manual resize. But what would this look like in wikitext and/or Parsoid DOM? --scott
ps. although knowing our long-term direction is important, I don't believe we should let the beautiful future prevent us from making concrete improvements to the present.