[whatwg] Features for responsive Web design

[Kornel Lesiński]

On Tue, 15 May 2012 19:25:23 +0100, Matthew Wilcox  
<mail at matthewwilcox.com> wrote:

> I think there's a fundamental mis-match in the mental model of how
> authors work and what they want. I'm pretty sure we're all shooting
> for the same "be more efficient" goal, but I think that here on the
> mailing list that's being approached from an angle that has not
> considered how authors actually want to do this.
>
> We work with designs that re-arrange content and sometimes call for
> different images of the same semantic meaning. That is *not* the same
> use case as simply sending a different version of the same image.
> Srcset only addresses that one type of use, and that is why authors
> feel it's flawed. It doesn't do what we need, and never can because
> srcset is based on the assumptin that a UA can somehow pick an
> appropriate resource to load - when it can't possibly know about the
> authors use of that resource at that time.

There's very good article about the two cases:

http://blog.cloudfour.com/a-framework-for-discussing-responsive-images-solutions/

srcset is not very good for "art-directed" case, while <picture> is  
perfect for it.

<picture> is not very good for resolution/bandwidth optimisation, while  
srcset is perfect for it.


I think those are simply two different problems that just happen to be  
called "adaptive images". We should recognized that they're separate and  
design separate solutions for them. A single solution can't do both well,  
since there's a fundamental difference between author-controlled and  
UA-controlled decision.

-- 
regards, Kornel Lesiński