What a difference a year makes

Sending this newsletter out on Eric’s behalf!


** One year
------------------------------------------------------------

One year ago today, we held a @respimg (http://twitter.com/respimg) browser-vendor meetup at Paris. We left it with an "all is lost" kinda feeling. Funny how things go.
—@yoavweiss (https://twitter.com/yoavweiss/status/509713788539764736)

Indeed. I remember waking up at an ungodly hour, half a world away from that meetup (http://www.w3.org/community/respimg/2013/09/18/paris-responsive-images-meetup/) , making myself a strong pot of tea, struggling to open the live stream, and proceeding to hear browser vendor after browser vendor mistake pieces of the responsive images problem for the whole and/or put the kibosh on a multi-element markup solution. I lobbed a few Qs from the peanut gallery (IRC room) before shuffling off to work, groggily consoling myself that, “well, at least we’ll have srcset=1x/2x.”

Fast forward to the present day. The RICG’s humble picture repo is now being piped directly into the official specs. The spec’s first full implementation ships (in Chrome 38) in a week or three. The RICG is being widely hailed as a success and a template – a place where developers, spec editors, and browser vendors all came together to understand each other’s pain points and make the web a better place.

The big, open questions are no longer about what the new markup should be, or how it should work, but about how dev (https://shoehornwithteeth.com/ramblings/2014/09/potential-browser-devtools-support-for-responsive-images/) tools (https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=415147) should present it (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1064715) .

New tutorials (http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/responsive/picture-element/) are being posted every week (and, if you’ll excuse a little horn-tooting, an old one was just translated into Japanese! (http://terkel.github.io/srcset-sizes/) ). Jason Grigsby has ceased advising conference rooms full of people to hedge their responsive image bets (http://blog.cloudfour.com/updating-responsive-image-guidelines-in-preparation-for-aea-austin/) and Bruce Lawson is already casting (https://twitter.com/brucel/status/510026698939969536) the (https://twitter.com/brucel/status/510028240413798401) movie (https://twitter.com/brucel/status/510029214733840385) .

Editor Simon Pieter’s focus has shifted from ironing out all of the little devils in the details of the spec to ensuring that those details are implemented correctly; he’s been busy building a suite of Web Platform Tests (https://github.com/w3c/web-platform-tests/pull/1234) .

And now that the new markup in browsers and specs, all that’s left is the enormous task of getting it into as many webpages as possible, via developer evangelization and education. I mentioned a couple of newsletters ago that various RICG-folk had talks in September; slides from Dave Newton’s (excellent) talk at the National Association of Government Web Professionals (https://speakerdeck.com/newtron/improving-performance-with-responsive-images-nagw) and Yoav’s (stellar) talk at Velocity (https://github.com/ResponsiveImagesCG/newsletters/issues/57) are now both available online.

What a difference a year makes.

See you in a couple of weeks!

—eric