- From: Jon Hanna <jon@hackcraft.net>
- Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2007 10:36:23 +0100
- To: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
- CC: "Henry S. Thompson" <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>, SWEO@spunkymail-mx6.g.dreamhost.com, IG?@spunkymail-mx6.g.dreamhost.com, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>, www-tag@w3.org
Dan Brickley wrote: >> Hmm? What _does_ a thumbnail of an JPEG (of a) photograph of the >> Eiffel tower depict, if not the Eiffel tower? If you show it to 1000 >> people, and as them what it is, I'll bet you all but the most >> obstreperous geeks (and Fair Witnesses :-) will say "(a picture of) >> the Eiffel Tower". Are they all wrong? > > Many automatic thumbnail algorithms (eg. flickr's) cut out a square from > the original rectangle, and so may omit content from the original. So > they don't necessarily depict everything that the original depicted. Further, anyone with the vaguest of understanding of the concept of "thumbnail" will understand thumbnail -> image -> Eiffel Tower. One of the reasons thumbnails are used at all is that when even extremely untechnical users see them in a context where it's clear that they are indeed thumbnails they grok immediately that a larger image is available through it. If anything their mental model is closer to thumbnail-> image than that of techies (who might be thinking much more along the lines of the image->thumbnail, link->image, link_contents->thumbnail mappings of the implementation).
Received on Wednesday, 13 June 2007 09:37:16 UTC