Not Without Incident

So – the Blink and Gecko `picture` implementations are 
[all](http://bugzil.la/srcset-prefon) 
[but](http://bugzil.la/picture-prefon) 
[finished](https://codereview.chromium.org/401403003/) and IE is still 
[“considering”](http://status.modern.ie/imgsrcset) 
[things](http://status.modern.ie/pictureelement). Yoav’s WebKit work 
is facing some [initial technical 
hurdles](http://ircbot.responsiveimages.org/bot/log/respimg/2014-08-07#T85645). 
So it was a relatively quiet couple of weeks around the RICG, but there 
was one bit of big news:

## [Picturefill 2.1 has 
landed](https://github.com/scottjehl/picturefill/releases/tag/2.1.0)

The new version of the polyfill brings it in line with many of the 
nittier, grittier aspects of the spec’s parsing algorithms. Edge cases 
and errors should all be handled as-per-spec, and identically to the 
first implementations. All the more reason to start using `picture` and 
`srcset` in production, now!

Other than that, a quiet fortnight. But it wasn’t completely without 
incident.

## Some other stuff happened, too

Chris Ruppel [wrote a nice article on automated testing of `picture` 
using  
CasperJS](http://fourword.fourkitchens.com/article/using-casperjs-test-picturefill). 
I don’t know much about CasperJS but I do know this: when developers 
rely less on fiddly manual window-resizing to test their responsive 
pages, everybody wins! Chris dosen’t get into testing `srcset` but 
this sort of automated testing is going to be especially helpful there; 
`srcset`’s functionality is essentially invisible.

Speaking of managing complexity, Rachel Andrew provided an excellent 
primer on 
[how](http://solutions.grabaperch.com/html-and-css/how-do-i-use-responsive-images-in-perch) 
and 
[why](http://grabaperch.com/blog/archive/perch-and-the-picture-element-for-responsive-images) 
to responsify your images in [Perch CMS](http://grabaperch.com). Hand 
Perch a hi-res image (or possibly a couple of crops) and, armed with a 
bit of template code, it will spit out all of the necessary source files 
and markup.

Like I always say, teach a page to `picture`, and it’ll serve users 
images tailored to their particular browsing environment forever. Teach 
a *CMS* to `picture`, and the effects will be significantly multiplied.

More of this sort of CMS integration, please!

Finally, [TAG](http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/)-alum and 
[#respimg](http://ircbot.responsiveimages.org/) lurker [Robin 
Berjon](http://berjon.com) published [a short article proposing a way 
forward for the HTML specification after 
HTML5](http://darobin.github.io/after5/). A biased TL;DR – make it 
work more like the RICG. Make developer-driven, feature-focused, partial 
spec work not just easy, but the norm. Decentralize the specs and lower 
the barriers to entry. Sounds good to me!

See you in a couple of weeks!

—eric