Teaser Text: It’s Cyber Monday, the newsletter’s late, and I am full of tryptophan and gratitude
We at the RICG are simultaneously working to both cleanly define the problems that element queries aim to solve, while also getting our hands dirty experimenting with a particular possible solution.
On the problem definition front — it has come to our attention that the use cases doc has heretofore gotten a teensey-weensie bit ahead of itself, by proposing a specific solution rather than cleanly, simply, and thoroughly defining the problem at hand. Mat took a first pass at cutting the fat, but work remains to be done.
The responsive images use cases document served as a rock and a guiding light through the three-year onslaught of failed respimg proposals. We need, above all else as we embark on this journey, a strong use cases doc. Help us write one.
Simultaneously, the RICG is taking a stab at realizing a proposed solution. Johnathan Neal has a functional (totally experimental, and never-to-be-supported) element query prototype up and running. Johnathan’s repo is a hacky little glimpse of one possible EQ ending, right here at the beginning of our story, which we can use to concretely explore the problem space, write demos, and provide feedback that will inform EQ work going forward. Huzzah!
And we’re going to need more hands on keyboards to get 2.3 out the door. Mat wrote an eloquent plea here.
True story: I drove 602 miles to Kansas City a fortnight ago to be a best man in a wedding and only then did it dawn on me that I wouldn’t be able to write both a toast and a newsletter before Friday. Oops. Mat bailed me out — in fine form. Thanks, Mat.
A while back I got pretty excited about chromestatus.com adding use counters for responsive image features. I did so in anticipation of being able to show you charts like these: responsive image markup adoption is surging like a bat out of aitch-eeee-triple-hockey-sticks.
There are RICG stickers! Stuff stockings accordingly.
I always loved a good turkey sandwich.
- Jason Grigsby will be talking respimg at An Event Apart in both Seattle and Atlanta
- Mat will be speaking about respimg, too – at Boucoup on December 17th in Boston.
- Steven Bradley over at Vanseo design has been on fire recently, posting a series of great posts about the new respimg features, culminating in this nifty demo.
- Emil Björklund threw up a little JSBin which shows and tells the benefits of using
pictureto deliver WebPs with JPEG fallbacks. - Jonathan Hollin wrote up his personal respimg workflow, which uses Hazel to automatically generate variously-sized sources and a markup snippet as soon as the images are dropped in a folder.
- ScientiaMobile wrote an article explaining the thinking behind their new (device-detection-centric) server-side auto-resizer, which stirred up some ambivolent reactions.
- Finally, this is in German so I can’t read it (but it looks mighty fine!).
See you in a couple of weeks!
—eric