Re: Serving retina images

This stuff is in our wheelhouse, for certain. Jason Grigsby has been fighting the good fight since day one of our brainstorming (hi, Jason!).

Apple is using a “broken” responsive images script, the nature of which I detailed in http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-images-how-they-almost-worked-and-what-we-need/ Long story short: even when a script along those lines isn’t ideal, it still serves a decent purpose: ensuring that only capable displays request the larger of the two images, as appropriate. Unfortunately, Apple’s approach too—and any like it, whether a matter of image dimensions or image resolution—is going to result in a redundant and wasteful request on platforms that pass the check for the larger image source.

This is absolutely an issue that our proposed element could solve, resulting in a single request for an image source with device-appropriate resolution. And, if media queries should ever be expanded to include bandwidth, imagine the potential there: being able to selectively deliver a high-resolution image to high-resolution displays but only on WiFi or better, falling back to a lower resolution image when using edge/3G/4G, and always sized appropriately for the device’s viewport—all with one request.

Any way you slice it, the new Retina iPad is going to make any method of serving appropriate image sources in an efficient manner all the more important.



On Mar 14, 2012, at 9:47 AM, Coralie Mercier wrote:

> 
> Hello Responsive Images CG,
> 
> I am bringing this to your attention as I think it might be in scope with your charter:
> 
> http://cloudfour.com/how-apple-com-will-serve-retina-images-to-new-ipads/
> 
> "How Apple.com will serve retina images to new iPads"
> March 13th, 2012 by Jason Grigsby
> 
> Coralie
> 
> -- 
>  Coralie Mercier  -  W3C Communications Team  -  http://www.w3.org
>     W3C/ERCIM - B219 - 2004, rte des lucioles - 06410 Biot - FR
> mailto:coralie@w3.org +33492387590 http://www.w3.org/People/CMercier/
>