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Posted by Andy Dingley on 01/18/08 14:16
On 18 Jan, 12:50, Jim S <j...@jimXscott.co.uk> wrote:
> Not strictly an HTML question, but what is the accepted size of graphics on
> a website?
"Big enough to be useful." There's no longer any need to constrain
photograph images size-wise solely for technical reasons. If you need
it 800px wide to see it, then use 800px width. Don't think that
"bandwidth" requires everything to be down-sized to under 200px, just
to control download times.
If you want thumbnails for a gallery, consider 200px width and four or
five across the screen, rather than an old approach of 100px or less.
Now you can at least see what the things are!
Certainly abandon <table> for a thumbnail gallery in favour of floated
<div> around each image/caption group. This permits big thumbnails on
small screens, and if the screen width doesn't permit many across the
screen, then it re-flows them to put fewer on each row.
All users' displays (for practical values of "all") are between 1000
and 2000 px wide. The few smaller than this can cope with some
sideways scrolling and a competent fluid design. Anything bigger than
this is either wall-mounted rather than a desktop, or is on multiple
screens. Either of these require different thinking from the single-
screen at arms' length model.
Phones are easy. Their networks will transcode images on the fly.
The remaining awkward clients are palmtops (my Nokia 770) etc. These
are around 600x200 in size and don't generally connect through a
transcoding network proxy. OTOH, I don't _expect_ this sort of ultra-
portable device to be convenient to use for huge images. However one
of my main uses for it is viewing >1000px-wide images (references on
silver hallmarks or signatures, from within auction and sale rooms),
so don't rule this out completely! Sometimes awkward scrolling is the
right behaviour, better than preventing access altogether.
A very good approach (requiring significant effort though) is that
used by wikipedia, wikicommons and mediawiki for handling images.
They're uploaded in any size up to "vast" (look at the Torre del
Acqua, Barcelona photo on Wikicommons) and the site publishing engine
re-sizes them as necessary. The size served depends on the context, so
a "thumb" or a "gallery" image on an article page is automatically
smaller than the image's own page. The size for each of these contexts
is also defaulted to a user-specific setting, which is adjustable for
large or small preferences.
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