On Wednesday, January 5, 2005, at 03:26 PM, Graham wrote:
I can understand the enclosures one, but has the image tag in RSS ever served a useful purpose? Without any standard size they're very hard to incorporate into most layouts. Every usage of them I've seen has always looked very awkward because of this.
I've found it useful, and haven't thought it that difficult to deal with the odd sizes. If you're using an HTML widget to do your layout (or converting to HTML and embedding in a web page), all you have to do is specify a width attribute in your img tag (and set the width the same for each image) and the image will get scaled, automatically maintaining the correct aspect ratio. The heights won't all be the same, and if a particular souce image is smaller than the width you've chosen, you'll get some pixelation[1], but I've found the results to be entirely satisfactory in most cases.
[1] If the XML specifies the image width, or if you check the dimensions of the images, you can often leave smaller images at their original size rather than scaling them up, depending on your layout. If, for example, you're floating images to one side, it's much more important to scale down large images than to scale up small ones to get your layout to look decent.
So yes, to some of us at least, it is useful.
Antone
