Chris has put together one of his indispensable deep dives, this time into responsive images. I can see myself referring back to this when I need to be reminded of the syntax of srcset and sizes.
A nice succint explanation of using the srcset and sizes attributes on the img element—remember, you probably don’t need picture and source elements if your use case is swapping out different sized versions of the same image.
One caveat thought: you do need to know the dimensions of the images. If you’re dealing with unknown or user-generated photos, that can be an issue.
The loading attribute for images and iframes is coming to Chrome. The best part:
You can also use
loadingas a progressive enhancement. Browsers that support the attribute can get the new lazy-loading behavior withloading=lazyand those that don’t will still have images load.
Back in 1993, David Raggett wrote up all the proposed extensions to HTML that were being discussed on the www-talk mailing list. It was called HTML+, which would’ve been a great way of describing HTML5.
Twenty five years later, I wish that the proposed IMAGE element had come to pass. Unlike the IMG element, it would’ve had a closing tag, allowing for fallback content between the tags:
The IMAGE element behaves in the same way as IMG but allows you to include descriptive text, which can be shown on text-only displays.
Yeah, I know we have the alt attribute, but that’s always felt like an inelegant bolt-on to me.
Jeremy Wagner offers a deep dive into lazy loading images (and video) with some advice for considering the no-JavaScript situation too.
The hits just keep on coming from the Filament Group. Here Scott shares a really clever technique for creating an image magnifier using the sizes attribute of the img element.
These icons-as-a-service could be really useful for making quick’n’dirty HTML prototypes.
This is really, really clever. You can’t use generated content (:before and :after) on replaced content. The img element is replaced content …but only when the image actually loads. So if the image fails to load, you can apply specific fallback styles (using :before and :after).
We’ve got Space Ipsum for text. Now we have SpaceHolder for images.
Smart thinking from Sara on providing a PNG fallback to browsers that don’t support SVG. Although, actually what I like about this solution is that it’s less about providing PNG as a fallback, and more about treating PNG as the baseline and SVG as the enhancement (an approach that the picture element is perfect for).
I share the concerns expressed here about the “sizes” attribute that’s part of the new turbo-powered img element (or “the picture element and its associates”, if you prefer). Putting style or layout information into HTML smells bad.
This is a concern that Matt Wilcox has raised:
Change the design and those breakpoints are likely to be wrong. So you’ll need to change all of the client-side mark-up that references images.
I can give you a current use-case: right here on adactio.com, you can change the stylesheet …so I can’t embed breakpoints or sizes into my img elements because—quite rightly—there’s a separation between the structural HTML layer and the presentational CSS layer.
Following on from that post of Jason’s I linked to, Chris also emphasises that, for most use cases, you probably only need to use srcset (and maybe sizes), but not the picture element with explicit sources.
It’s really, really great that people are writing about this, because it can be quite a confusing topic to wrap your head around at first.
Jason points out that the picture element might not be needed for most responsive image use cases; the srcset and sizes attributes will probably be enough—that’s what I’m doing for the photos on my site.
This is a really nice and simple idea: view photos from a specific place taken at a specific time. Voyeuristic fun.
Luke rounds up some of the alternatives to bitmap-based images—an increasingly important topic for “resolutionary” “retina’ displays (bleurgh!).
A fascinating trip down memory lane to the birth of the IMG element.
Google Maps now provides static (IMG-based) alternatives to the JavaScript API.