[WikiEN-l] Re: Article size consistency 32k

Sun May 22 21:11:26 UTC 2005

Geoff Burling wrote:
<snip>
> Download times are a very off-putting experience whenever one deals with
> the Web, & very few web developers bother to optimize for speed -- or
> even consider it a problem. Google is an amazing -- & very rare exception.
> (I've had this discussion with a web designer friend several times, who
> at least understands this issue -- although he's still a bit hobbled
> with the "I want them to see the site how I choose, not how they may want
> to choose" attitude.)
> 
> And turning images off is not the solution. Much of the time, I want to
> see some of the images in an article, such as  a map, or specific
> photographs of a person or a place; I'm not interested seeing in every
> known image with the proper license that could be related to the
> subject.  Which is why I mentioned commons: not only does it support a
> competition for the best images in a given category by allowing a
> practically unlimited number of images to be uploaded, it does not
> require the losers to be deleted because they are unused -- & allows
> them to be available to compete in other categories.

I don't know if this might have ever been suggested before already, but 
perhaps a change in software could allow us to set a maximum image size 
in our user preferences? Either in width/height, e.g. "always shrink 
images to less than 200 pixels wide or 150 pixels high, whichever is 
smaller", or in kB, e.g. "always shrink images to less than 10 kB". 
There should probably be a limited number of selections, so that the 
images could be cached the same way they are for regular thumbnailing. 
And of course, you probably wouldn't want the rule applied to Image: 
namespace pages.
How hard would this be to implement, and would it strain the servers 
much to have to serve up even more different-size versions of the same 
picture?
It seems to me it could certainly speed up the page loads for those on 
<56kb/s connections. But then again, you might also end up with weird 
formatting, when the author/editor inserting into a page doesn't know 
how large the image ends up being displayed.

-- 
John R. Owens
ProofReading Markup Language : http://prml.sourceforge.net/