Latest Web Dev News: Lyza Danger Gardner on Building the Web Everywhere: Look at the Big Picture: I dread the inevitable moment during every complex responsive project when someone raises the question, What should we do about images? Lots of the things we do on the web are hard, but I reserve a special, damaged place in my delicate dev heart just for images. The quandary of images on the multi-device web flusters me because we’re in fact trying to solve many problems at once. Existing options to solve these problems are varied, controversial, incomplete and, in many cases, not actually available to us. When asked to contribute a strategy, I lack a straightforward answer for the same reason that others do: because one doesn’t exist. Not to disparage the admirable flurry of invention and progress! The picture element looks like it might be an actual thing, and srcset is already happening. Godspeed! But those and other building blocks need to circle overhead a while longer before we can have at them, leaving us nothing to get on board with right now. But let’s assume that at some point not too long from now we will have new tools at our disposal, tools that allow us to define and deliver ideally optimized images to different users with different devices, connections, and contexts. OK, then what? My “do as little possible” sensibility still feels ruffled—will we successfully incorporate image wrangling into an adapted build-the-web workflow? Or are we assuming a level of oversight that might not scale? Problem 1: Making it stronger and faster The modern, pan-device web’s relationship to images has a slightly square-peg-round-hole feel to it, and the awkward fit chafes at multiple points. There are numerous kinds of puzzles here, though they tend to fall into one of two generalized problem sets—use cases, as they’re called in some documentation about proposed image standards. The first set of problems involves optimization, coalesced around the notion that shoving an enormous image out to a user with a small screen is both wasteful and a little bit cruel (think bandwidth costs, browser performance, and battery life). Those architecting the future web aim to ratchet up image performance across devices in a variety of ways: cooking up new file formats, tuning compression in existing ones, rooting around in the internals of HTTP to find opportunities for speed-boosting. What’s starting to emerge are new options for today’s implementors to start considering, like the ability to handle image-resolution switching with srcset. It’s hard. Making one chunk of the optimization puzzle fit causes weird bulges in other areas. Early responsive image techniques using JavaScript successfully provided different images in different contexts (yay!), but got in the way of browser optimizations, which caused a performance hit (sad). dlvr.it/5cDtql
Posted on: Thu, 08 May 2014 13:01:11 +0000
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