[whatwg] Implementation complexity with elements vs an attribute (responsive images)

[David Goss]

On 13 May 2012, at 13:19, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis at googlemail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, May 13, 2012 at 12:26 PM, David Goss <dvdgoss at gmail.com> wrote:
>> As I understand it, the <img srcset> syntax would
>> have to keep getting extended every time we wanted to test a different
>> property.
> 
> It doesn't "test" anything. It tells the UA metadata about the image
> set it would otherwise have to obtain by downloading them all.
> 
> UAs can pick the right image based on this metadata plus what they
> know about dimensions and orientation of some container, pixel
> density, and connectivity.
> 
> It would need to get extended if we learnt of further image metadata
> we needed to expose to UAs to help them pick the optimal download
> (maybe MIME type).
> 
> Media queries test client properties, but this syntax is attempting to
> describe an image. If we were trying to avoid reinventing wheels at
> all costs, we'd want to look at an image description vocabulary like
> EXIF:
> 
>    http://www.w3.org/2003/12/exif/
> 
> --
> Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Yes, you're right, I should have referred to "including more metadata" not "testing more properties" when referring to the set syntax.