21 March, 2007

Dear Madison.com Webmaster

Dear Madison.com Webmaster,

Please find a new program to scale images for your webpage because the Commodore 64 sprite look has gone out of fashion. In the past I've noticed that your current scheme for scaling makes some black people look like they're covered in silver glitter. Today you've managed to make Mayor Dave look like Emperor Palpatine.




While I have issues with the mayor, he is not quite as evil as this comparison suggests.

Thank you for your attention,
A concerned reader

2 comments:

tlekan said...

The cause of the problem you identify is that we use computers where we should use human beings. When there were no resources to do such things, this was a great accomplishment. Consider that, at the time, our only alternative would have been to have no photos on the site at all. Today we find ourselves in that brief lag period between when newspaper companies started really caring about the web and when tangible changes begin to take shape.

If that is not clear enough, here it is from the unheralded genius who directly balances problems like these:

"Yes, it's a drag having to automate a process that really could use the human touch. Journalists assign images to their stories, but a computer resizes the image for them, sometimes with less than spectacular results. Speaking from experience, having the journalist resize the picture before uploading it takes us from 'less than spectacular' to 'potentially tragic'.

The good news is that the tools we are currently using are at the end of their life cycle (maybe a bit beyond that actually). In an upcoming series of upgrades to the site, we hope to address this issue."

Skip said...

Thanks for the explanation. I hope the upgrades happen soon.