First off, after months of work, John Schoenick published thirteen patches for Firefox last week which provide “basically-working” picture, srcset, and sizes implementations! Grab John’s “Work In Progress” builds and see for yourself here.
Over on the Blink side of things, Yoav Weiss soldiered on, adding picture support to the DOM and working on preloading. And Google developer Christian Biesinger landed some changes to the basic algorithms governing image loading which pave the way for picture.
Christian introduced the concept of “stable state”. Previously, Blink would greedily load an image source as soon as it saw it; now it politely waits for processes which might switch that source out from under its nose to finish. For instance: the code Yoav is writing to pick a URL out of a picture element and its sources.
Foundational and exciting stuff!
Speaking of foundational and exciting stuff, work is being done to integrate picture into the HTML spec proper. WHATWG editor Ian Hickson has concerns about picture’s maintainability and offered to turn over responsibility for the pertinent parts of the Living Standard to Simon Pieters of Opera, one of picture’s editors. Simon accepted, and the Group’s GitHub repository is now the canonical home of the WHATWG picture and img specifications, which will henceforth be pulled from there into the WHATWG document automatically.
When we started this process we thought we’d get a responsive images solution into specifications first and browsers second. But the web, as they say, runs on rough consensus and running code. After years of work we’ve achieved both and have worked our way into the spec the other way ‘round.
Here are a few front-end-dev-centered, picture-related links from the past couple of weeks:
- Scott Jehl talked about PictureFill and responsive images generally on The Big Web Show
- Martin Wolf shared his experience learning to use
srcsetandsizes - Tim Kaldec urged developers to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good: use the new markup now and work to leverage other layers of the stack to make responsive images even easier, later.
- Over at Smashing Magazine, Tim Wright published an introduction to PictureFill and yours truly penned a tour of the spec and the use-cases it was designed for.
If you gave Sizer Soze a spin after reading about it in the newsletter last week and found it a bit flaky, well, it’s better now. Harder better faster stronger. So go forth and measure how many bytes your non-responsive images are wasting!
See you in a couple of weeks!
—eric