I've been fiddling with a new iPad, with its notoriously high-resolution display (2048x1536, roughly similar to the iPhone 4's earlier 2x resolution jump on the small screen but on something "real" sized). Text renders stunningly sharp. And you know what else?
SVG. Graphics. Look. Totally. Awesome. On this screen! I've got a little user script which replaces rasterized SVGs with their scalable originals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Brion_VIBBER/hidpi.js even without fixing up any of the pure-raster images yet, this gives a visible improvement to pages containing maps, flags, site icons, etc which are often SVG. Similar resolution screens will likely be coming to laptops sooner than later, so we should definitely start looking into making our UI and our images look awesome. (It'll also tend to help when printing or zooming in in the browser -- for instance zoom in on the tables at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Games#Host_nations_and_cities and you'll actually see the flags, not just blurry little piles of pixels.) I've filed a bunch of bugs about low-resolution PNG and GIF icons in our user interface, under the high-density tracking bug: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=32101&hide_resolved=1 over time we should make sure that our UI is consistently scalable; using native SVG icons with fallback PNGs should do. We'll have to do some experiments to determine a good way of doing fallbacks, deciding when to render things out fully, etc. It may make sense to have some per-image controls -- for instance files that are known to render very slowly we might prefer to serve as rasters; non-SVG drawings may also benefit from loading at higher resolution on high res displays. Anyway, more fun stuff for people to think about. :) -- brion _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
