Chrome 38's new HTML tag support makes fatties FIT and SKINNIER Google has recently pushed out Chrome 38, for desktop and mobile devices. Google updates its browser every six weeks – so often, in fact, that much of the time there isn't much in the way of new or worthwhile features. Not so with this release. Among the changes Chrome 38 has support for new features in JavaScript, as part …
I worked for a company that provided a "pervasive internet" middleware platform that was supporting full content adaptation (not just for screen size but also for target markup such as HTML, XHTML, WML, Voice XML etc.) and this came with an out-of-the-box solution for this problem.
Not only did it allow selection of the "best fit" from a pre-defined set of image "variants", but it also had its own image transcoder so if you didn't want to spend ages creating all those nice variants you could simply perform a (cached) server-side transcoding.
Again, this transcoding could account for image size but also image format and maximum image size (in data terms, so you could adjust image quality to allow for not just device but also network capability).
We had all this back in 2004. Unfortunately other aspects of the platform didn't keep pace with technological change and it bit the dust.
Having said that, it's nice to see this aspect, at least, becoming part of an implemented standard, at last.
This isn't quite the same thing; one of the use cases is giving the browser the power to select what density of image to download based on its own state. So if you zoom in, it can download a higher-density image. If you're near your data bandwidth limit for the month or it's just loading a preview thumbnail, it can download a lower-density image.
These are not decisions that can be made on the server side or, reliably, via JavaScript.
"and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team has indicated that responsive images support is on their roadmap as well." This is politburo speak for 'we don't have an answer - yet - but now you've mentioned it, what a fab idea'. More evidence that the 'roadmap' for IE, so closely tracking the 'Surface' of another dimension is at best erratic and missed the whole multi-device idea.
No, it's another way for sites to offer user agents ("browsers") more choices about how to display the page. If the user agent is well-written, the new img attributes give the user more control over rendering.
The picture element is a bit of a mixed bag, since the media rules are supposed to be mandatory.
What do you mean by 'bordering on'? I think they have already passed them, at least in the budget to mid range area, i.e. places where people don't have an unlimited budget. (Top end of course is a different story).
As an example, my current (8 month old) phone has a 1080p screen, so is already equal to the most common size of desktop monitor (also being 1080p), and greater than budget to mid range laptops, which typically have 1366x768 screens.
My GFs new phone now has a 1440p screen, so surpasses all low to mid range resolutions, and is equal to some high end monitors.
Of course nothing stands still, and if you're not budget constrained, desktop monitors are now coming in 4K resolutions.
Personally I think 1440p is about as high as a 6" screen would ever need to be, you'd need a magnifying class to see any higher on a screen that size.
Roll on the 8K and 16K 27" desktops.
As that would mean cheap 4K monitors :-)
Phones are bordering on having larger resolutions that many laptops and desktops these days.
Not everyone wants to spend their money on expensive phones.
Resolution isn't the entire story, particularly for people with reduced visual acuity. Which is pretty much everyone who lives long enough to tell you damn kids to get off our lawns.
For me the mobile version of facebook in Chrome on Android has been oversizing the pictures in the last few days so they massively overlap the screen and can't be fully viewed as you can't scroll on the mobile version. Sometimes it will sort itself out after a few refreshes, but not for long... Just checked and I upgraded to Chrome 38 a few days ago. The picture tag is a roaring success then!!
If most web developers genuinely cared about this sort of thing, the functionality of the picture tag could be implemented right now as a javascript function acting as an img wrapper. The fact that it's not suggests to me that when this new tag becomes a standard browser element, nearly all sites are going to serve up the same image regardless (or worse, a choice of 2 images, with the smallest one being impossibly blurry until the user zooms in or views it on a higher-resolution monitor).
In reference to a previous poster, server-side scaling of images is a no-no because it's an exploit waiting to happen. What developer wants to be responsible for a malformed image giving an attacker root on the server or performing DoS because the http server had to parse the image to rescale it?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
