Re: Title of the spec may cause heartache

So, I have been following from the start. However the sheer volume of
emails and communications on the subject became impossible to consume. I
stopped reading everything avidly about 2 years ago because I assumed once
we'd reached consensus it would be easier to pick it up again and all I was
reading was people raising the same 10 issues over and over without any
real direction.

I appreciate that has been reached but I would say there are probably a lot
of people like me out there who were keeping a weather eye on it, not a
close detail analysis and I think Jason is right that the nuance of there
being something other than the picture element may have missed those people
by. (it certainly missed me)

Yoav's article is good (thanks for the link) I'd suggest putting more real
world examples up on HTML5 rocks, The web platform and MDN for starters. I
think showing people how to use the different techniques is the best way to
communicate there is more to the spec than just picture.

I don't think it would hurt to rename it to something more generic and less
'picture' but for all I know that involves some insane W3 committee
decision and blind submission in triplicate to a panel of supreme beings so
feel free to ignore that last suggestion


On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 7:05 PM, Odin Hørthe Omdal <odinho@opera.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 22, 2014, at 17:45, Jason Grigsby wrote:
> > I think this will be a challenge for us as we move to educating people
> > because people will strongly associate the picture specification with the
> > picture element, but for the most common use case, resolution switching,
> > the picture element isn't the best solution.
>
> This.
>
>
> With picture+media being so powerful, I've been very afraid (from the
> start) that it will be used the wrong way.   I don't think the
> visibility of @srcset and @sizes (the ones solving the most common uses
> you see today) on <img> is good enough.
>
> However, no big damage is done if people think <picture> is the way to
> (correctly) use @srcset, @sizes and (seldomly here-be-dragons) @media.
> If the we get a substansial part of the web developer population
> misunderstanding and thinking <picture @media> is 'responsive' images,
> we might be in a bind.  Since @media is so flexible, you can seemingly
> implement something "good enough" with it.  Indeed this very group
> wanted that at the start.
>
> I've very seldomly seen any article mentioning responsive images saying
> that "you almost always want srcset+sizes, sometimes if you really want
> you can *add* media".  In the few discussions I've read on the web,
> there's a lot of wrong impressions and falsehoods going around.  Few
> seem to understand it.
>
>
> As most communication, the message reaching general web dev community
> will probably be a simplified one.  I think selling an HTML-tag is much
> simpler than the more complex story.  However, thankfully the story sold
> is not "<picture> element with media queries", it's only about the
> element itself.  So when people look up documentation, there's hoping
> they'll find some good docs and use the actual functionality they
> require.
>
>
> If they would find and read articles written by people of this group,
> there is surely no danger.  E.g. Yoav's excellent primer on Dev.Opera[0]
> even has things in what I'd define to be the "correct order" ;)  There
> will come a time, however, when other less ... well-informed ... sites
> might put out their own docs which could or could not follow in the same
> paths.
>
>   0. https://dev.opera.com/articles/native-responsive-images/
>
>
> I make it to a very big point that you probably want to use <img> with
> @sizes and @srcset.  Not because I'm against <picture>, but just because
> a) in many cases you won't need it, and most importantly,
> b) there's no @media on <img> so it can't be potentially misused there.
> :)
>
>
> In the context of all the "picture element" articles and discussions, it
> makes for a memorable reply; the responsive images spec made <img> fully
> useful for most responsive image usage; .
>
>
> Mairead Buchan said:
> > Can someone explain to me what the different actually
> > is because this is the first time I've heard that they
> > are two separate things
>
> If you read Yoav's above primer I think it should be quite clear.
> Though it is hard to say for us that has followed along from the start,
> since we know these things by heart already :)
>
>
> Jason Grigsby said:
> > Do you have any alternative way of describing the
> > picture specification that side steps this issue?
>
> I always talk about responsive images, and I think I probably say the
> respimg specification.
> --
>   Odin Hørthe Omdal
>   odinho@opera.com
>
>