For years, I have weeped and wailed about people adding complicated maps and diagrams as 220px thumbnail images to Wikipedia articles. These sort of images are virtually useless within an article unless they are displayed at relatively large sizes. Unfortunately, including them at large sizes creates a whole new set of problems. Namely, large images mess up the formatting of the page and cause headers, edit links, and other images to get jumbled around into strange places (or even overlapping each other on occasion), especially for people on tablets or other small screens. The problem is even worse for videos. Who wants to watch a hi-res video in a tiny 220px inline viewer? If there are subtitles, you can't even read them. But should we instead include them as giant 1280px players within the article? That seems like it would be obnoxious.
What if instead we could mark such complicated images and high-res videos to be shown in modal viewers when the user clicks on them? For example: [[File:Highres-video1.webm|thumb|right|modal|A high res video]]. When you clicked on the thumbnail, instead of going to Commons, a modal viewer would overlay across the screen and let you view the video/image at high resolution (complete with a link to Commons and the attribution information). Believe it or not, this capability already exists for videos on Wikipedia, but it's basically a hidden feature of TimedMediaHandler. If you include a video in a page and set the size as 200px or less, it activates the modal behavior. Unfortunately, the default size for videos is 220px (as of 2010) so you will almost never see this behavior on a real article. If you want to see it, go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sign_Language#Variation and click on one of the videos. Compare that with the video viewing experience at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pain. It's a world of difference. Now imagine that same modal behavior at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_Peak_Granodiorite#Geological_overvie... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jutland.
Such an idea would be relatively trivial to implement. The steps would be: 1. Add support for a 'modal' param to the [[File:]] handler (https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/66062/) 2. Add support for the 'modal' param to TimedMediaHandler (https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/66063/) 3. Add support for the 'modal' param to images via some core JS module (not done yet)
As you can see, I've already gotten started on adding this feature for videos via TimedMediaHandler, but I haven't done anything for images yet. I would like to hear people's thoughts on this potential feature and how it could be best implemented for images before doing anything else with it. What are your thoughts, concerns, ideas?
Ryan Kaldari