Responsive images meet-up in Paris

The Responsive Images Community Group, the W3C, and Mozilla would like to
invite members of the WebPerf WG to a meet-up to discuss a path forward for
responsive images. We hope the meeting can take place on the 10th of
September in Paris at the Mozilla offices (just before the CSS WG meeting,
which starts on the 11th). So far we have confirmations from Apple, Adobe,
Google, and Opera.

The purpose of the meet-up is to discuss the current proposals, assess the
obstacles to their implementations, and build momentum behind the problem
space.

A little more detail:

For the last couple of years, various folks have been working towards
finding a way to bring  responsive images to the Web, with significant
interest from Web developers. Although we now have 3 proposals on the table
(srcset [1], <picture> [2] and client-hints [3]), we've had trouble getting
sufficient momentum behind browser implementations that would let the
market decide which solutions fulfill the use cases most effectively.

In the mean time, Web developers have had to make due with custom polyfills
which often prevent browsers from loading the image resources until after
the DOM was (at least partially) loaded and Javascript on the page has run.
This directly hinders the performance work browser engineers have done over
the years to optimize resource loading, and get requests on the wire as
soon as possible, according to their priority. That leaves developers with
the dilemma "Do we stall the image load, or download unnecessary image data
which will slow down the overall load time and inflate the user's bills?"

Proposed agenda:

1. Introduction to each of the proposed solutions.
2. Implementors feedback on the solutions
3. Overlap among solutions
4. Next steps


Since the subject touches directly on Web performance, it might be of
interest to members of this group. Space is fairly limited, so let us know
whether you’ll be able to attend as soon as you can. Thanks!

Yoav Weiss
RICG

[1] http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/srcset/w3c-srcset/
[2] http://picture.responsiveimages.org/
[3] https://github.com/igrigorik/http-client-hints