WebKit gets the full `srcset` and `sizes`!

Posting today’s update on Eric’s behalf!


WebKit gets sizes — three cheers for Yoav

Yoav Weiss had a big week. First he implemented and enabled sizes in WebKit Nightly.

Apple being Apple, no one can say for certain what this means about when the feature will be landing in the iDevices and desktop Safaris of the world, but we can say this: it’s coming.

For those keeping count (me!), that’s three major rendering engines — Blink, Gecko, and now WebKit — with completed srcset and sizes implementations, testable now and slated for stable-channel release. And we’re hearing positive, unofficial noises from the fourth!

Back to Yoav. He was just added as a Blink core owner — a title that comes with no little amount of power and responsibility. Yoav is one of only sixty-two out of hundreds of thousands [citation needed] of Blink contributors to have the title, and the only one I see on the list with an email address not ending in Chromium, Intel, Samsung, or Opera.

While this newsletter spends a significant amount of time simply listing his accomplishments, now seems like a particularly nice time to offer Yoav our thanks and congratulations. Thanks, Yoav! And congrats!

Responsive elements in Blink — complete picture implementation imminent

picture needs to react to changes in browsing conditions, post-load. If it didn’t, an art-directed layout that relied on a certain image appearing at a certain breakpoint might break on window-resize.

Previously, while JavaScripts could listen for and react to environmental changes, there was no good way for plain old elements to do so. In a set of recent patches, Google's Christian Biesinger has enabled Blink to define C++ listeners to environment changes, generally, and given source elements the ability to re-evaluate their media attributes in real time, specifically.

With that work done, picture can run its selection algorithm whenever one of its source’s senses a relevant change, and picture can switch out images responsively.

A fully-functioning picture implementation in Blink is right around the corner!

Spreading the word

There isn’t too much else to report this week but I did want to mention an excellent talk on the new markup, delivered by Matt Steele to Omaha Coffee & Code. Let’s trim down those websites!

See you in a couple of weeks!

—eric