Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

Most of Wikipedia articles explicitly set the sizes of the thumb images (instead of relying on 
user preferences). Since presently the image size can only be given in pixels, the articles are 
optimized for a particular screen resolution (typically 1024x768) and look very different at 
other resolutions. Therefore, it is highly desired to have the possibility to specify the width 
of the image frame in non-pixel CSS length units: in, cm, mm, pc, pt, em or ex. For example:

<nowiki>[[Image:Picture.jpg|thumb|2in|Caption text]]</nowiki>

Here is how the non-pixel width could be processed by the engine. First, it generates the 
image with the number of pixels corresponding to the provided width at the resolution 
specified in user preferences or by default -- say, 90 dpi. Thus, in the example above it 
would render an image 180px wide by default. Second, the server returns an XHTML with the 
img tag that contains no width or height attributes and instead contains only a style 
attribute that specifies the required width of the image:

<nowiki><img src="Picture.jpg" style="width: 2in;"/></nowiki>

Thus, at higher screen resolutions the browser will scale up the image so that it will always 
have 90 dpi.