What are the chances of syntax changes?

Last year I wrote an article with eight guidelines and one rule for
responsive images:
http://blog.cloudfour.com/8-guidelines-and-1-rule-for-responsive-images/

The one rule was "Plan for the fact that whatever you implement will be
deprecated".

I've incorporated these guidelines and the rule into presentations. Now
that picture is arriving in browsers, I'm reconsidering these guidelines
and the rule.

In particular, I'm trying to get a sense of how likely it is that the
syntax for picture might change.

I still believe there are tremendous benefit to centralizing the handling
of images and image markup. But it no longer seems a certainty that things
will change. If anything, it seems more likely that picture will continue
as spec'd.

I'd love to hear from someone with more perspective on the lifecycle of
standards about how confident we should feel that picture will stay as
currently spec'd. Is it common that features like this get tweaked a little
in the future as people start using them and an oversight is found? Should
we still be hedging our bets a little? Or does it seem extremely unlikely
to change at this point?

Thank you,

Jason

P.S. I'm not trying to spread FUD about picture. I'm pushing for people to
implement picture. It's a question about to what risk a company might have
putting the picture element on hundreds of html pages and then finding that
it needed to be updated because the spec changed slightly or something like
that.



-- 
+1 (503) 290-1090 o | +1 (503) 502-7211 m | http://cloudfour.com