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

[Markus Ernst]

Am 24.05.2012 10:27 schrieb Matthew Wilcox:
> Excellent, sorry I was not clear on that; this is looking good!
>
> I would like to re-iterate that this solution is another which puts
> design properties into mark-up directly, and just like old<picture>
> and srcset, this means that when it's time to re-design a site an
> author is going to have to trawl through all<picture>  elements
> throughout the site to adjust them to fit the new design.
>
> This is to my mind a major problem which stops any such solution from
> being a general-purpose solution. I'd be ok for one-off special uses,
> but I can't write website's that I know to be future un-friendly -
> that's just storing up problems for the future.

This is true only for the art-direction use case, as MQs are removed 
from the optimization use case.

Unless a new proposal comes up that solves this issue, too, I think this 
is something we can live with, for two reasons:
- The art direction use case is somehow at the edge between content and 
design. Serving a cropped version of an image is actually dealing with 
content, even if it is about the design situation.
- New designs usually require other image dimensions, meaning that 
images have to be recreated anyway. In my practice I have seen several 
redesigns of websites; none of them was restricted to CSS, in all cases, 
the whole websites were rebuilt, or at least the content was entirely 
reviewed. (My experience is very much focused on corporate situations, 
so this may be different in other fields such as academic.)