Alternate images for different media

Problem:
Images designed for display on computer screens are too small to be used
on video/TV screens. When such images contain text, they can be read due
to the closeness of the computer screen. These words disappear at the
larger distance of video/TV screens.

Web documents designed for computer screens can be adapted by using
style sheets for different visual media, but the problem is that such
images cannot be resized without sacrificing too much resolution. There
is something missing.

Solution?:
One solution would of course be vector images. But this cannot be
applied across the board.

Another solution would be to match copies of images in different sizes
to specific media. 
Here one strategy could be to dump all small screen images in one
directory, and all large images in another. Then we need a way to
declare a BASE element related to a path and image declarations in the
body of the document.

OR
 when an IMG is declared in a document, there should be the possibility
to declare alternatives. Then we would need an additional attribute,
perhaps an extension of the functionality of the "media" attribute?

I am not sure what the solution would be, but I cannot find any solution
in the present recommendations. Is there something I've missed?

I guess there may even be an application of such a feature for TV-Web
and SMIL applications.

Any thoughts?

Jacques

Received on Wednesday, 30 December 1998 11:55:23 UTC