[whatwg] Features for responsive Web design

[Ian Hickson]

On Thu, 11 Oct 2012, Mathew Marquis wrote:
> On Oct 11, 2012, at 12:36 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> > On Thu, 11 Oct 2012, Markus Ernst wrote:
> >> 
> >> IMHO as an author, the "bandwidth" use case is not solved in a future 
> >> proof manner
> > 
> > It's not solved at all. I didn't attempt to solve it. Before we can 
> > solve it, we need to figure out how to do so, as discussed here 
> > (search for "bandwidth one"):
> > 
> > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2012May/0247.html
> 
> The RICG has proposed a solution to dealing with the overarching issue 
> of bandwidth; it’s described in the following post: 
> http://www.w3.org/community/respimg/2012/06/18/florians-compromise/
> 
> In the interest of keeping relevant information on the list, I’ll 
> repost the relevant section here:
> 
> It would assume a great deal if authors were to make this decision for 
> the users. It would add a point of failure: we would be taking the 
> bandwidth information afforded us by the browser, and selectively 
> applying that information. Some of us may do it wrong; some of us may 
> find ourselves forced to make a decision as to whether we account for 
> users with limited bandwidth or not. To not account for it would be, in 
> my opinion, untenable — I’ve expressed that elsewhere, in no 
> uncertain terms. I feel that bandwidth decisions are best left to the 
> browser. The decision to download high vs. standard resolution images 
> should be made by user agents, depending on the bandwidth available — 
> and further, I believe there should be a user settable preference for 
> “always use standard resolution images,” “always use high 
> resolution images,” ”download high resolution as bandwidth 
> permits,” and so on. This is the responsibility of browser 
> implementors, and they largely seem to be in agreement on this.
> 
> In discussing the final markup pattern, we have to consider the above. 
> Somewhere, that markup is going to contain a suggestion, rather than an 
> imperative. srcset affords us that opportunity: a new syntax _designed_ 
> to be treated as such. I wouldn’t want to introduce that sort of 
> variance to the media query spec — a syntax long established as a set 
> of absolutes.

How does this address the points in the e-mail I cited above?

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