Re: Picture Element Explanation.

Hi Paul,
aside of all the technical reasons that have been given, the most relevant
reason you should not use MQ for responsive images is the one Tady Walsh
pointed out: accessibility.
*Images are not style*, *but content*, so they have to be accessible
without CSS or JS and they need an *alt* attribute to be fully accessible
and an HTML tag to be semantic. And by accessible I mean not only for
disable people, but for Search Engines too. Do you think Google is going to
index your design images, not even knowing what is in it?

Also they start loading before the CSS images do, as a couple of mates said
before, and they are part of the structure and the content, both at a time.
There are to kinds of images, the one used for styling that should be
loaded by CSS, as you said, and a content image, that illustrates the text
and/or in some cases represents 80% of the whole content. *How can we
pretend to control by CSS a CMS content? Thousands of images...* is not an
option

Me my self as a layout designer and UX, I'm not very happy with the actual
solution, but I agree it must be a DOM based solution, not a CSS MQ.

People here have been working a long time to get with this solution, *we
should try to read and understand why is it like this, how it works and
what does it pretends*. Then, maybe, we can bring a new solution if we are
capable too, but what we can't do is to ask to those who have been
selflessly working hard to develop and test a solution, to work for free
just to demonstrate us, that their solution is not wrong, just because we
don't have the knowledge to understand it by ourselves!!

Hope you get the point.

best regards,

*Daniel Abril*
UI/UX Designer & Semantics Lover

On Mon, Mar 2, 2015 at 5:34 PM, Paul Deschamps <pdescham49@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all I hope this message finds you well :)
>
> I have some questions / concerns about this picture element; I imagine
> that this is not the first time someone has called out this proposed
> implementation.
>
> Some background on myself (though I don't generally like to call out my
> area's of expertise) however as this is my introductory email to the list
> perhaps this is a case where it is valid to do so.
>
> I've been developing in the web for some twenty plus years now; building
> everything from small static sites for private business to large scale CMS
> / GIS web applications since NCSA Mosaic was released.
>
> I've watched HTML transform from the old days of blink tags and lovely
> "site hit counters" to Tables for layout and all the other lovely mistakes
> that were made back then including of course the "browser wars" when I ran
> a small business
> built on a custom built CMS that pre-dates  Wordpress or even PHP Nuke.
>
> I've built 20-30 or so GIS cross browser web applications during these
> "Browser wars" where IE 6 was the vain of my existence.
>
> Beyond being a web developer my vocational training is actually in Graphic
> Design - of which I've been working in photoshop / Illustrator since it's
> inception. IMHO CSS and the power of it was revealed to me with sites like
> : http://www.csszengarden.com/ in 2003 and it was sites like these that
> caused a revolution for the web.
>
> ...
>
> But that's enough about myself. :)
>
> My question is as follows:
>
> I am a purist and strongly feel that any "Styling / Cosmetic" decisions
> should reside within the CSS alone and HTML should only be the "construct"
> containing structure only. The picture element feels like it's trying to
> accomplish
> something in the wrong place.
>
> Would it not be a cleaner solution to simply have cross browser support
> for "*content: url()*" instead? or perhaps there is something that I am
> missing here I would love for someone to explain to me why this approach is
> better than a CSS solution.
> and please not dismiss it with a simple phrase.. show me your code.
>
> Perhaps it is too late but I fear that the advent of this picture element
> will be looked at in the future just as like "Tables for layout" did in the
> past.
>
> Your comments are encouraged and greatly welcomed.
>
> My fiddle is here: http://jsfiddle.net/n935nznp and supported in chrome.
>
> Cheers and all the best.
>
> Paul Deschamps.
>
>