Re: What do we do with picture?

On 17.10.2013, at 16:28, Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com> wrote:

> Hi All, 
> The Editors of the <picture> spec been under pressure from the HTML Working Group Chairs to take some action with regards to picture. We can continue to move it forward along the recommendation track or we can "end-of-life" it by publishing it as a Note. In light of the src-n proposal, I'm inclined for us to publish it as a Note. The rationale being that src-n does exactly the same things that <picture> was doing, but overcomes the shortcomings with <picture>, in particular:
> 
> 1. we don't need a new element (picture) that represent something that semantically already exists in the platform (img). 
> 2. we don't need to special-case the <source> element. 
> 3. we don't need to have an element that accepts child elements (which browser vendors don't like).
> 4. we don't need to define all sorts of complex interactions between <source> and <picture> by monkey patching "media elements". 
> 
> The src-n proposal is by no means perfect - particularly the viewport-url syntax might need a little more love; but apart from that, it's basically all the goodness of <picture> in a nice little img package.  
> 
> So, does anyone have any objections to us publishing picture as a Note? 

Hi,

I personally think <picture> still is the way more intuitive markup for normal developers. 
Some people might remember the approach I proposed 2.5 years ago to the whatwg - it was quite similar to srcN but was rejected by RICG and not followed along by WHATWG either as it has some caveats:

- not easy to understand
- harder to maintain due to the {n} number, like removing number 2 out 3

This said, your points on the complexity of implementation are all true.
I hope all of you are aware that this srcN or whatever solution we come up are a milestone and will hold for at least several years.
I simply want to avoid that all developers will complain about this in one year and have to deal with a syntax that people simply don't understand.

And I also think we already created a big mess due to the implementation and adoption by developers of srcset which now should be replaced by srcN.
Sorry, this might sound a bit harsh but many people don't care about a standard solution of respimg anymore because of all that confusion. And I could
imagine that WebKit might be more cautious to implement such new things in future.

My 2 cents on the topic. Thanks for considering it.

Cheers,
-Anselm

Received on Thursday, 17 October 2013 14:42:21 UTC