Image size specifications

Ka-Ping Yee (kryee@novice.uwaterloo.ca)
Wed, 12 Jul 1995 20:38:27 -0400

I had a look at the <fig> and <img> tags in the proposed HTML 3.0
specification, and i was a bit shocked to discover that image sizes
could be specified only in device-specific means (pixels or en-widths).

I'm of the fairly strong opinion that one should be able to specify
sizes relative to the "available area" for an object (which might be
the window size or document length, for instance). There's a demo
page at the Arena site where two long, thin images are aligned left
and right to form a nice border for some text -- except that
* the border is of course never the right length
and * much bandwidth is wasted transmitting a large image
of a repeating pattern.

The first may be solved with the interpretation of "%" units in
addition to pixels and en-widths (i'd even prefer this over pixels
as the default unit). Thus the Arena page could use HEIGHT="100%".
WIDTH and HEIGHT are merely *suggestions*, not *requirements*, for
rendering -- but if we're going to have them for images, there is no
reason why they should not be allowed for <HR>s.

The second may be solved by specifying just how an image may be
brought to match the desired size. This could be implemented with
an attribute TILE (to form a repeated pattern) while the default
behaviour would be to stretch/zoom the image to the needed size.
With <HR SRC="..."> this would at last make it possible to customize
horizontal rules that always come out to the right width.

Ping (Ka-Ping Yee): 2B Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Canada
kryee@csclub.uwaterloo.ca | 62A Churchill St, Waterloo N2L 2X2, 519 886-3947
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