What a month. Personally, I went to Germany to speak (!) at SmashingConf (!!!). Never did I think an interest in respimg would take me to a medieval hall, half a world away, to tell hundreds of people how to do their jobs. But! It did! And I drank bier and ate würst and met heroes and made friends. It was as wonderful as it was surreal.
And I actually had a newsletter all written in the Frankfurt Flughafen, ready to fire off as soon as I got home, but by the time I got there the RICG had won a pair of Net Awards, necessitating a re-write.
Feels good, man. To the links!
That was quick. Edge version 10547 supports picture and sizes.
This means that (with a single, hopefully-soon-remedied exception) every current version of every desktop browser now supports the full suite of responsive image features.
Oh, and the Edge team will probably implement image-set(), too!
The energy (and consistency!) behind the respimg-in-WordPress team is a joy to behold.
They released a new version of the official plugin last week, which, among other things, brings respimg support to images published before the plugin was installed, using output filters. This is one more step towards the larger goal: bringing respimg functionality to WordPress core.
A very large website (anybody know who?) deployed x descriptors this month and doubled the current level of usage overnight: x descriptors are now used on ~1% of Chrome pageviews. That’s a very big deal, but ws hitting WP-Core might an order-of-magnitude bigger.
Mat, Yoav, and the good people at Akamai collaborated on a pair of whiteboard-style respimg tutorial videos. They’re fast-paced and accessible; the visual metaphors surprise and delight. Watch!
Jake Archibald had a respimg “epiphany” recently — “I’m writing it all down before I forget everything.” His post conveys a a ton of information extremely economically, and it’s somehow personable and digestible, too. Everything that you need to know about the syntax in a pretty-short blog post. Read!
Finally — my interest in Client Hints still far outpaces my expertise, so I learned a lot from this article by Mr. Client Hints himself, Ilya Grigorik. Automate!
- Picturefill 3 should be out of beta imminently.
- Spec changes afoot: the
widthattribute is now used as a fallback for invalidly-omittedsizes, and the meaning of the Client HintsWidthheader just changed from CSS to device pixels. Someday I shall catalog the many definitions of the extremly-overloaded word “width” w/r/t respimg... - Understanding and communicating how an adaptable image will adapt within a responsive design is hard. Kevin Mack and Tim Vonderloh gave a presentation at the Columbus Web Group explaining how they apply the concepts and language of print (where variability comes from imperfect processeses) to respimg (where the variability happens by design).
- Last and maybe actually least, Facebook blogged about their cover photo optimization efforts. The post doesn’t mention respimg, per-se, but it does contain a lot of insight into how Facebook actually goes about making, managing, and delivering images efficiently at Facebook-scale.
Tschüs!
—eric