[whatwg] The src-N proposal

[Bruno Racineux]

On 11/18/13 6:21 PM, "Kornel Lesiński" <kornel at geekhood.net> wrote:

>However, the most terse syntaxes are starting to look like Perl. It's not
> 
>always the best idea to squeeze every byte out of a syntax.
>
>Even if none of existing proposals is perfect in terms of DRY, I think
>overall they're good enough to be useful. I'm not concerned about
>verbosity, because gzip is excellent at removing cost of any repetition,
>so on the wire the most verbose and the most terse syntax cost the same.

Nods. Though all too often your basic host with eventual easy CMS one
button install does come gzip ready or configured, unfortunately. And
webmasters don't care or know enough for enabling it. And unless those
hosts actually realize they are shooting themselves in the foot by not
making it a default. That concern will likely exist for the users and
devices, to some extend.

And it can still bear quite higher cost in other places, like caching,
output buffering (and strreplacing in that). But I guess that's only my
performance perfectionism speaking, on the latter.

>As you know there has been proposal for Media Query Variables, so it
>seems  
>quite probable that a similar thing can be added for other properties of
>responsive images as well.

That's the 'quite probable' that bugs me.

>One way to convince browser vendors that such syntax is needed is to let
>them ship the basic version with full URLs, and then you'll have proof
>that URL patterns emerge and authors complain about verbosity (or not :)

As I explained above, it's the user and networks who will suffer from dumb
hosts, and/or inadequately informed webmaster, both of whom could't care
less.

Maybe Google should announce they'll start penalizing sites who do not
gzip, to change that. Either a press release on April 1st, just as an
educational scare tactic. Or a actual Webmaster Tools notification for
more awareness of non-gzipped site, or both :)

Because these (only 0.2% uzing gzip) stats do not look good at all in
support of your theoretical argument:
http://trends.builtwith.com/Server/GZIP-Module