[whatwg] Media queries, viewport dimensions, srcset and picture

[Henri Sivonen]

On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 6:21 PM, Florian Rivoal <florianr at opera.com> wrote:
> On the other hand, I think that including 600w 400h in there is misguided.

I agree.

> 1) simplyfy srcset to only accept the *x qualifier

Is there a good reason to believe that * will be something other than
a power of two?

That is, could we just optimize the *x syntax away and specify that
the first option is 1x, the second is 2x, the third is 4x, etc.?

> I believe the only way out is through an image format that:
...
> - is designed so that the browser can stop downloading half way through
> the file, if it determines it got sufficiently high resolution given the
> environment

More to the point, the important characteristic is being able to stop
downloading *quarter* way through the file and get results that are as
good as if the full-size file had been down sampled with both
dimensions halved and that size had been sent as the full file. (I am
not aware of a bitmap format suitable for photographs that has this
characteristic. I am aware that  JPEG 2000 does not have this
characteristic. I believe interlaced PNGs have that characteristic,
but they aren't suitable for photographs, due to the lossless
compression.)

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/