Re: ACTION-15: How to load assets depending on MQs

A nice description of the problem.

It's noted on the action that both Robin and Jean-Francois wanted to contribute - any comments from either of you?

For my part, a couple of questions:

1) Re the following statement - it would be useful to have some links.

In current implementations as of August 2012, no popular user agent pre-fetches resources that are subject to media queries until those media queries are satisfied.

2) I'm wondering what other work is going on about controlling the order of loading resources etc?

3) I'm wondering under what circumstances the browser doesn't know that a media query might become true and requires a hint to tell it? Would another way of looking at this be to instruct the browser NOT to preload things that might become true?

4) I recall back in the days of Mobile Web Best Practices we tested to see whether browsers loaded resources which had display:none, and iirc they all did. So if a developer wants to preload some resources then how about specifying them with display: none to precipitate a preload in the MQ that doesn't need the resource.

Jo

On 13 Aug 2012, at 14:09, Robert Shilston wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> At the Coremob F2F at Facebook earlier in the summer, we accepted an action to explore asset loading and media queries.  Specifically, this was to draft a non-normative document with implementation notes about how to load assets depending on media-queries that can never become true 
> 
> After consideration and research, we've prepared an article [1] giving our point of view on preloading of assets within media queries.  In short, we've suggested a mechanism for developers to provide hints to the browsers to guide their decisions as to whether to preload.  We've done this in what we believe to be a backwards compatible way.
> 
> Best wishes,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Rob
> 
> 
> [1] http://labs.ft.com/2012/08/a-proposal-for-preloading-resources-bound-by-media-queries/
> 
> -- 
> Dr Robert Shilston [07940 387593 | skype:rtshilston | @rtshilston]
> Director, FT Labs [labs.ft.com | 0870 085 2038 | @ftlabs]
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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