Re: What do we do with picture?

On Thursday, October 17, 2013 at 3:41 PM, Anselm Hannemann wrote:

> On 17.10.2013, at 16:28, Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com (mailto:w3c@marcosc.com)> wrote:
>  
> I personally think <picture> still is the way more intuitive markup for normal developers.
Could be. But they are equivalent syntaxes used for both. The only different is the use of an attribute.    
>  
> Some people might remember the approach I proposed 2.5 years ago to the whatwg - it was quite similar to srcN but was rejected by RICG and not followed along by WHATWG either as it has some caveats:
>  
> - not easy to understand
> - harder to maintain due to the {n} number, like removing number 2 out 3

do you have a pointer?   

> This said, your points on the complexity of implementation are all true.
> I hope all of you are aware that this srcN or whatever solution we come up are a milestone and will hold for at least several years.

Yes, this is an important point. But src-n didn't come out of the blue. Both John and Tab have been very much involved in trying to solve this problem for a long time. These guys have given this stuff as much thought as we have and they have a darn good spec to boot.   
> I simply want to avoid that all developers will complain about this in one year and have to deal with a syntax that people simply don't understand.


You are talking about the viewport-url? If so, that's just one of the three possible options. I'm still skeptical about viewport-ulr, but I like that media queries and the srcset syntax are both supported (so it's not different from picture, which should hopefully overcome a lot of learning difficulties).  
  
> And I also think we already created a big mess due to the implementation and adoption by developers of srcset which now should be replaced by srcN.

There are no browsers shipping with srcset so I'm not sure what you mean? Seems that most sites that are using srcset are using it with picturefill.  

Those sites in the top 50k are, according to webdevdata's sept data set:

vogue.es
wmich.edu
marefa.org  
bitcoin.it
sportswiki.ru
cato.org

Of course, there are more.  
> Sorry, this might sound a bit harsh but many people don't care about a standard solution of respimg anymore because of all that confusion. And I could
> imagine that WebKit might be more cautious to implement such new things in future.

No, I think those assertions are fair. Community-driven standardization is a new thing in our industry and we were bound to make mistakes along the way (we fail better every day - and getting all the browser vendors together in Paris was a testament to that!). I can also understand that people are experiencing standardization fatigue, but we are not doing too bad. The IEEE did a study about the average length of standardization and they found it takes about 5 years [citation needed]… so we are pretty much still on track.  

This stuff if hard, it will take time, and we have to persevere.  
> My 2 cents on the topic. Thanks for considering it.
>  

No probs - thanks for sharing your thoughts here.

Received on Thursday, 17 October 2013 15:05:12 UTC