[whatwg] RWD Heaven and responsive-images

[Ronjec Viktor]

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 2:19 AM, Jason Grigsby <jason at cloudfour.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Feb 8, 2012, at 8:04 AM, Ronjec Viktor wrote:
>
> > People, this is really getting out of hand...
> >
> > 1. WHATWG is a standards body, meaning it _standardizes_ solutions.
> > Everyone who followed the discussion up until now can easily tell that
> > currently there is no unified, or even close to common approach to this
> > topic yet. Someone says the solution is on server-side, the other one says
> > it's on the client-side, the third one says network protocol, the forth
> > says headers... This is not the place for such a discussion IMHO.
>
> As a newcomer to the list, I’ve tried to wade in lightly because I’m not certain how these things work. So I’m pleased you wrote that.
>
> My question would be where should the conversation happen then? It seems that within the authoring community finding a solution to handling images has been a hot topic for months. But my experience has been that whenever I see attempts to bring the conversation to people deeply involved in the standards process, the problems are often dismissed or many objections are raised the proposed solution.
>
> Two weeks ago I was talking with Ernesto Jiménez about how the W3C and WhatWG efforts needed feedback and participation from authors. But it is unclear to me how that should happen.
>
> To wit, we have a problem that many of us have being trying to solve. I for one don’t have confidence that those of us who are commonly outside the standards-setting process have the correct answer. I’d be happy for someone smarter than me to propose solutions that move things forward.
>
> To make that happen, it seems necessary to convince people that an actual issue exists and to discuss potential solutions somewhere. So an honest and humble question, if that doesn’t happen here, where does it happen?
>
> -Jason

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 11:36 AM, Matthew Wilcox <mail at matthewwilcox.com> wrote:
> +1 to everything Jason Grigsby just said.
>
> If not here, where? If not with you, with who? We've been doing this
> publicly for months and months...


To prevent being labelled as a troll for questioning the merit of such
ambiguous discussion on WHATWG, I have contacted people for help.
Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, who himself has made proposals on solutions
concerning the topic to the W3C HTML Working Group
(http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2011May/0386.html)
has recommended to me that maybe creating a Community Group at W3C
would be in order. Community Groups differ from Working Groups in that
participants of the discussion are trying to find a common ground for
consensus on what a solution should be to a given problem, before
proposing it for standardization to a standards body.

In my opinion, until everyone is proposing something else (e.g. HTTP
headers, SPDY protocol, "device classes", new markup with new alt
tags, etc) we create the following CG and move the discussion there:

Proposed name:
Adaptive Media Community Group

Proposed group description:
The Adaptive Media Community Group is a community of web developers
seeking a solution so that embedded media in HTML (e.g. images and
videos using the <img> and <video>), and their properties (e.g.
dimension, compression ratio) are optimum to given factors, such as
device screen resolution or available network bandwidth.

Proposed shortname for CG:
adaptmedia

Of course, creating a CG would be completely meaningless if there is
no interest and support for it from the community. I believe there is
interest for it, but the question is, is there support for it?

The above is just a my proposal in advancing this discussion, and
until there is no feedback about this from people on the "RWD Heaven:
if browsers reported device capabilities  in a request header" and the
"add html-attribute for "responsive images"" threads, and other
developers concerned in Responsive Web Design, I don't think I should
just create the group and hope that the discussion will just move and
concentrate there on its own. So open for feedback on this!

Kind regards to all,
 Viktor