[whatwg] Features for responsive Web design

Wed May 16 12:26:16 PDT 2012

I had mentioned to you before that I had this little 'niggle' of a
feeling of something wrong about that, and I figured out what it is.

If you move the decision of /which/ image is the correct image to the
head of a document, then the content is no longer autonomous and
semantic, because the content alone no longer contains everything
needed to know to understand the content.

On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 3:19 PM, Matthew Wilcox <mail at matthewwilcox.com> wrote:
> On 16 May 2012 20:12, Jacob Mather <jmather at itsmajax.com> wrote:
>> Maybe this is the better question:
>>
>> Why does the pre-loader matter so much?
>>
>> Basing the selected image off of browser width is inherently
>> backwards. The content should be informed by the layout, not by the
>> browser.
>>
>
> I do agree with you (it's all about layout rather than screen width -
> it's the layout that dictates the content images and it's the screen
> width that dictates the layout - there's a clear stack of dependancies
> and at the moment that isn't reflected in the technology we use).
> However I think the problem right now is that at the time the browser
> see's the <img /> it is likely to not know the layout. The CSS hasn't
> loaded yet and the layout hasn't been applied - so the image can't
> know how big it needs to be. This is why I put forward the idea of
> setting breakpoints in the <head> as a <meta> tag. That is the one and
> only place that other technologies can be sure will have already been
> loaded.