What is happening to **inline** images (sometimes used to replace some text which is hard to render, such as letters with stacked diacritics rarely supported in fonts, where the word is instead rendered using an SVG image, or small icons, when they are not inserted by using a custom template?

OK there's a problem with inline images because they cannot be easily dimensionned according to the current font size and positioned according to the line-height and specific baseline of some scripts, and they cannot match other font styles. But they are still needed in some cases because it is not possible to build custom fonts in pages without support of page-level CSS, or scoped CSS (it is impossible with inline CSS in element style attributes that don't have selectors).

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Note that it should be possible to rescale an inline SVG image to fit in the 1.6em line-height using CSS "max-height:1.6em" in the <img> HTML element, but MediaWiki still does not support setting any "style=" attribute in [[File:name]] or [[Image:name]].

You can see the effect of client-side image rescaling in the Mobile view of our wikis: it uses "max-width:100% !important" (in addition to other really dirty quirks such as changing the "box-model:" of almost all elements to "border-box" inherited from old "IE quirks mode", rather than the standard "content-box", breaking lots of layouts, even though the mobile view has never been meant to be used with old version of IE; but meant to be used with standard HTML! Someone shoud rework the Mobile view to remove this dirty quirk that breaks lots of layouts as it applies to ALL spans and blocks, forcing many templates to manually set the "content-box:content-box" everywhere and dewikifying lists with ol/ul + li or dl + dt/dd...).

With the support client-side image rescaling (support of "max-height:" style in wiki-images), inline images are safe in the middle of a paragraph (for now they are supported provided that template specify small heights, below 20px).