Comments on: The Importance Of Dynamic Content

By: Sean

Sean — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:52:52 +0000

That’s a problem I’m trying to figure out right now. I coded my own blog from hand, and I’m still working on making some adjustments and improvements. The next thing I’d like to add is a image uploading script, but what how should I resize the image? If I make it too small, then it looks bad if I decide I want to make it larger. If I make it too big, it takes too long to download. Ergh.

As a side note, I’m sure you’ve probably noticed, but for some reason this post keeps showing up in Google Reader. Right now for your RSS feed it’s just this post, thirty times. Don’t know what’s going on there.

By: davin

davin — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 07:38:57 +0000

Hardcoding the dimensions in the HTML does speed up rendering, depending on the layout.

But anyway, that doesn’t matter since the difference is neglibile in most scenarios in this day and age.

Good post. CSS can override inline HTML widths though, so perhaps part of this post is moot? I used max-width for my iPhone CSS layout (which is not perfect yet, but getting there).

Die IE6!

Random: Your RSS feed has blown up with about 27 new RSS entries for 2 new posts. I clicked on one to get here and it went through about 5-10 (no idea) feedburner redirects. What is going on?

By: Dale Mugford

Dale Mugford — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 04:34:57 +0000

As an addendum, are the nanoseconds gained by hardcoded declaration worth a dime, really? It’s more likely that the optimization of the image itself for the web will yield far greater results in terms of speed than in hardcoding its width and height.

By: Duane Storey

Duane Storey — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:22:20 +0000

Obviously it depends how much you scale the image up, but in most cases I’ve run into it, the image was larger than the post area anyways, in which case you were already scaling it down. For example, most people I know include Flickr photos in their posts, even though the standard Flickr size is larger than their post area. In that case, it’s definitely possible to adjust the size of the image via CSS and still have it look correct. Also, I would argue that in many cases, scaling an image or a video up by 10-20% looks far better than having a smaller version that looks obviously out of place in the context of the rest of the content.

I’m not sure I buy that specifying width/height speeds it up. I mean, CSS is parsed before the image, so it could potentially read that before it reads the inline definition for the image. Also, I’m fairly sure that XHTML strict doesn’t allow any width/height or inline styles either, so using those elements basically means you’re forcing your clients to be in transitional or below when designing their sites.

By: Jamie

Jamie — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:22:33 +0000

A prevalent line of thought about specifying width and height when using an tag is that this allows the browser to parse the image faster; it knows how much space it needs to allocate in advance, rather than relying on a CSS declaration or examining the width of the image itself. As a web developer I do this, as do a lot of others I know.

Also, I was a bit puzzled by this: “For example, let?s say you manually specify a width of 400px for an image. If one day you decide to change your theme post area to display 500px worth of content, suddenly all your images are too small. To fix the problem, you most likely have to go through and manually edit every IMG HTML tags to change the width.”

I’m not quite sure I understand what you’re implying. If you change your theme post area to 500px instead of 400px, your images won’t change size whether you specify the width or not. If the image is 400px it’ll still be 400px. Are you talking about using CSS to stretch out of proportion in order to fit a container? If so then I humbly suggest that your results will probably look silly. If you change a container from 400px to 500px and the images within are 400px, if you want them to be bigger you’ll still have to manipulate the images.