[whatwg] <img> element comments

[James Graham]

Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> On Tue, 07 Nov 2006 03:49:40 +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas 
> <mpt at myrealbox.com> wrote:
>> In 1998 I used a version of iBrowse for the Amiga that treated <img> 
>> width= and height= in the way Ian proposed -- as preliminary advice on 
>> the dimensions of the image, reflowing if the actual dimensions turned 
>> out to be different.
> 
> I thought the proposal was that only that (setting height and width to 
> the intrinsic size of the image) would be conforming, but that rendering 
> would still be the same.

That's the impression I had. But it seems like a really pointless thing 
to specify; there will never be a browser released that can both render 
images and does not render them at the with and height (or, in the case 
where the dimensions are larger than the screen size, at least aspect 
ratio) suggested by the width and height attributes. Given their 
frequency of use (far more than e.g. alt[1]) and the fact that the 
values will be different on a per-image basis, it is clear that the only 
sensible replacement is the-mother-of-all-presentational-attributes 
"style". So it's not even clear that removing or restricting these 
attributes would be a significant win for semantic purity: in most cases 
authors would just achieve the same effect with the more complex syntax 
of the style attribute.

[1] http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/element-img.html

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