[whatwg] add html-attribute for "responsive images" Mathew Marquis

[Anselm Hannemann – Novolo Designagentur]

Irakli,

I think it is not about markup vs server-side-solution. Server-side is not a solution at all I think. 

But it's about wether it's markup based (which means we also could serve different content in images on different resolutions which would be a feature!) or file-based as responsive (progressively downloading) image-format in WebP or other formats. But even if WebP gets such a feature it takes time to implement this in format and in browsers which would be quite more complicated as we have the codec-problems again here.

So I think we at least need a markup based solution. If we then will get a responsive file format some time it's great but we can't expect that now.
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For the element's name I think either <image> (seems to cause trouble in older browsers but not sure if we have to support them? Mean it should work well and standardized in future not now…) or <picture> would be fine.

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-Anselm

> Mathew,
> 
> thanks for raising that point.
> 
> I think we need to decide whether markup-based solution is a workaround forced on us because there was no good solution or whether it is a solution we should pursue, if implemented properly.
> 
> And this brings us to a very technical discussion about RESTfulness of either approaches (server-side negotiation vs. markup-based descriptors).
> 
> -- Pros of server-side negotiation:
> 
> If you look at an image as a unique resource, then representing it with a unique URL and adjusting diff crops or resolutions of the image for device-targeting based on HTTP headers is very much like using unique resource URL and altering output format based on accept headers, which is the RESTful and recommended approach.
> 
> I can see an argument that diff crops of the same image are not the same resource, but esp. in the context of targeting diff. devices, I think that's not true. If XML and JSON versions of a document are the same resource, then device-specific versions of an image should be as well.
> 
> Good food for thought, however.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Irakli