Re: Larger profile pic than 80KB?

[cavac]

Well, 80kB is enough for a picture. I don't see that as a limitation, more of a challenge to overcome. My profile picture is even animated. And the "you can't post pictures in discussions" thing didn't stop me from posting colorful pictures and Gnuplot graphs.

It's just a test on out-of-the-box thinking.

[kcott]

++ And I'd already upvoted your two other examples.

"My profile picture is even animated."

So is mine. It's an APNG and comprises about three dozen individual images. There's a lot you can do with just 80kB. :-)

[eyepopslikeamosquito]

My profile picture is even animated

Related to the recent nudge from kcott, and without really understanding what I was doing, I was surprised to see an animated "eyepopslikeamosquito" Unicode emoji (with a blinking eye) with the following in my private scratchpad:

<P>
<pre>
<img src="https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/e/notoemoji/latest/1f441_fe0f/51
+2.gif"
alt="&#128065;" width="32" height="32">
<big><big><big>&#127870;</big></big></big>
<big><big><big>&#128077;</big></big></big>
<big><big><big>&#129439;</big></big></big>
</pre>
</P>

That is, the above displays an animated blinking eye along with the usual "pops", "like", and "mosquito" Unicode emojis ... but only in my private scratchpad, not when I Preview the post.

I got the idea from these two web sites:

• Upcoming updates to Unicode Emojis - including animation
• noto emoji animation - all things related to animating Noto Emoji

If anyone can explain the difference between my private scratchpad versus making a post, please let us know. Update: I only see the animation in my Scratchpad (both Private and Public) while Editing, when I View either Scratchpad, the animation disappears.

Also interested to hear opinions on whether animated emojis are welcome on Perl Monks or should be banned.

[kcott]

G'day 👁️🍾👍🦟,

I pasted the HTML you provided in my Private (Edit) Scratchpad: it rendered as you described with an animated eye followed by three static emoji. Switching to my Private (View) Scratchpad, I saw:

<img src="https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/e/notoemoji/latest/1f441_fe0f/512.gif"
alt="👁" width="32" height="32">

followed by three static emoji.

It's always been my understanding that the <img> tag is not allowed on PM. I do seem to recall reading that somewhere; I can't find it quickly. That tag does not appear in "Perl Monks Approved HTML tags".

So, allowing <img> in Private (Edit) Scratchpad is possibly a mistake; alternatively, it may have been done on purpose for some reason I don't know about. It should probably be disallowed there too.

An emoji is just a character, it's a few more bytes than an ASCII character, but that's all. Your blinking eye is not an emoji: it's a GIF image with a size of 258,960 bytes. I note that it's too big for the 80kB (upload) limit for a home node image.

Emoji have been used on this site responsibly. Some have used ☺️ in lieu of :-) (or similar) in a few places. Occasionally, we've had a bit of fun, in a few isolated groups of nodes, where several emoji have been used. I'd like to see that status quo continued.

In general, I do not like blinking or flashing content; I find it distracting and annoying.

With the <img> tag disallowed, animated emoji are banned by default. Let's keep it that way.

[LanX]

Dear 👁️🍾👍🦟,

Congrats to your 2222nd post. =)

(Let's take bets about when you'll reach 3333 then ... ;)

[LanX]

As usual this discussion is missing the real point, IMAO°

It's not if 80kb are enough, but if settings from the end 90s are sufficiently user friendly nowadays.

I'm not sure if it's even possible to set my smartphone to such "small" camera pics.

And a "new" website would do the downsizing on server side to avoid bothering the user.

Since changing the code here is too much of a hassle, we should consider providing a help text explaining how to easily down scale pics to 80kb.

Like a one liner for convert on Linux...

°) in my arrogant opinion...

update

In hindsight, rescaling could probably already be done on client side nowadays., with JavaScript.

A current Firefox so fat that I have trouble running it on an old netbook, so there must be some included lib for that. (Emacs as operating system jokes are for grandmas ;)

Quick search found https://imagekit.io/blog/how-to-resize-image-in-javascript/ (tldr)

[cavac]

Of course, you are right. 80kB is quite a low limit these days.

But even modern up-to-date web platforms have relatively low limits on profile pictures that are hard to match with a modern phone camera without editing. For example, Mastodon has 2MB with a max size of 400x400, mostly to reduce network traffic and server storage. Every time a user looks into their timeline, the browser has to fetch all profile images from every user displayed in the timeline. A server might have to store hundred, thousands or (if the platform takes off) maybe even millions of profile pictures.

I think most of the bigger websites these days do (at least) the cropping on client side. It's the stuff where you "upload" a picture of your face and then it asks you to resize and position it so your face fills the rectangle or circle. This, too, saves on network traffic and a huge amount of server load.

An alternative/addition could even be some kind of avatar generator for those monks that don't like to upload a real photo. Something like this one.

[LanX]

> Of course, you are right. 80kB is quite a low limit these days.

That's not what I meant. (Maybe I should have been clearer)

I'm happy with 80kB

I said the real question is to help the user downsizing their pics.

Even if we allowed 2mb today, who knows what people expect in 5 years.

Terabytes? Holograms? Scratch&Sniff? °

°) I personally want individual User PEZ drops flipped into my mouth.

[Bod]

It's not if 80kb are enough, but if settings from the end 90s are sufficiently user friendly nowadays

Spot on LanX

The Monastery is wonderful for the content, community and cooperation that exists here. But I do sometimes wonder if Noah is wandering the archaic corridors. If Perl is to be the language of choice for programmers in 25 years time, I very much doubt it will be The Monastery that will entice them.

Having said that, they tell me "retro" is in fashion...

Edit - missing verb added - thanks to kcott for spotting the mistake.