Teaser text: Chrome 38 is nigh, we have links galore and also Shakespeare for some reason.
Chrome 38 — the first browser to support native responsive image markup – is due to be pushed out to the stable channel’s hundreds of millions of users any day now.
While we wait, let’s recap a bumper-crop of responsive image chatter from the past couple of weeks:
To
picture, or not topicture– that is the question:
Jason Grigsby and Chris Coyier wrote a pair of excellent articles that hammer home the distinction between the resolution-switching and art-direction use cases; picture is best reserved for the latter. When you’re not art-directing, use srcset!
Chris gives the friendliest technical explanation of how browsers actually use srcset, sizes, and w to pick a source that I’ve yet seen.
And Jason asks: why do we call it “the picture spec”, anyways? Maybe we shouldn’t!
Whether tis nobler in the mind to polyfill
Thesrcsets andsizes, outrageously awesome
Meanwhile, over on the Filament Group blog, Scott Jehl (Picturefill author) takes a hard look at some very hard questions: why polyfill, ever? What are the benefits and what are the costs? Given the new markup’s native fallbacks, why polyfill responsive images, specifically? It’s a very thoughtful take; he comes out on the side of Picturefilling, for now.
Scott’s post came out of a discussion of whether or not to include Picturefill in Drupal 8. Drupal’s developers are blazing all kinds of trails as they work furiously to implement the new markup. Watching them hash out a responsive images CMS UI has been particularly fascinating.
Or to take arms against a sea of implementers
and by dymanic [sic] attacks, oppose them. To DIY— feature creep—
“I will write the fresh hell out of a spec.”
No more; and by a speech or two we end
The headache, and deliver a thousand natural talks
That flesh out how-to.
The videos from Yoav’s responsive images and preloader talks at Velocity are up. And if the topic of preloaders fascinates (or befuddles), Andy Davies slides from London Webstandards are worth a look.
Dave Newton gave a great respimg talk at Accessibility Camp Toronto; his slides are here and here. The Venn diagram explaining how responsive design, performance, accessibility, and progressive enhancement are all distinct, complimentary pieces of a strategy that reaches as many people as possible is a favorite.
And last but not least, RICG Chair Mat Marquis gave a talk at An Event Apart Austin and only threatened the audience with violence once.
Tis an implementation
Devoutly to be wish’d.
I’ll say it: Microsoft is embracing an open stance towards the open web. First the Internet Explorer team let us know what they’re working on; now they’ve taken things to another level entirely and are letting us vote on new features. I think you know what to do:
Those two are currently trailing Service Workers, the Shadow DOM, auto-update, and two different suggestions that IE’s rendering engine be abandoned entirely. Old IE-hating habits die hard!
To code— to commit.
To commit— perchance to deploy: ay, there's the rub!
Lastly, I want to point you to Brent Lineberry’s recap of his team’s responsive image implementation on Emory’s Goizueta Business School site. The website in question is large and complex; first-hand accounts of the rubber meeting the road like this are invaluable. I expect to read a lot more of them in the coming months as the dev community as a whole figures out how to best leverage the new features.
See you in a couple of weeks!
—eric