RE: Feedback on Responsive Images Extension

Fair enough.  I'll hold my concerns for now.  I do think that we'll see people targeting specific devices and loading images, and it would be good to prevent or more actively discourage it.  One way might be to get a WCAG failure technique as soon as we see implementations of <picture> so at least people will have another resource to help show that all that is possible is not acceptable.

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Group Product Manager, Accessibility
Adobe Systems 

akirkpat@adobe.com
http://twitter.com/awkawk

http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility


-----Original Message-----
From: Mathew Marquis [mailto:mat@matmarquis.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2012 6:40 PM
To: Andy Davies
Cc: Anselm Hannemann; Brett Jankord; Andrew Kirkpatrick; public-respimg@w3.org
Subject: Re: Feedback on Responsive Images Extension

On Sep 4, 2012, at 6:17 PM, Andy Davies <dajdavies@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 4 September 2012 23:03, Mathew Marquis <mat@matmarquis.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On Sep 4, 2012, at 5:46 PM, Anselm Hannemann wrote:
>> 
>> We had this discussion a couple of months ago in the W3C community 
>> group. I started it with the same intends as Andrew but after all it 
>> we came to the resolution that it's not what picture is thought for.
>> If you define a picture-element you will most likely link to one 
>> image. This image crop/color/properties can vary but not the image 
>> meaning / content itself. If you want the meaning / content to 
>> change, just use a server-technology or JavaScript to properly change 
>> the source and alt. But it's no use-case for the picture-element.
>> 
>> 
>> Agreed: this is a case better solved by way of JavaScript or 
>> server-side UA detection. If the subject matter cannot be accurately 
>> described by a single `alt` attribute ( or additional descriptive 
>> markup, as discussed previously ), it is a disparate set of images 
>> and not a case I feel we should account for with `picture`.
> 
> I guess my question would be how does someone specify a 'null' image 
> then i.e. have an image a certain breakpoints but no image at others.

One could make a case that an image not essential to every browsing context may well be presentational in nature, and should be handled through CSS. Else, in the case of strictly *content* images, that markup should likely be injected/removed or shown/hidden through JavaScript by way of matchMedia — alternately, that markup could be omitted entirely based on server-side device detection.

I wouldn’t want to encourage inherently "null" markup with regards to images any more than I would encourage a solution for serving "null" text — which is to say, the "null" case is best represented by the absence of said markup altogether. A native solution for controlling the *presence* of markup based purely on client capabilities is a larger conversation, and very likely one worth having. I don’t feel this is best solved on an element-by-element basis, however.

> 
> Resorting to JS to fix this seems the 'wrong' way to go to me
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Andy
>

Received on Wednesday, 5 September 2012 01:50:01 UTC