PUBLIC MARKS from decembre with tags image & Responsive

the browser only knows the size of the viewport when it begins downloading images.

There are a bunch of techniques going around for dealing with responsive images lately. That is, solutions to help us serve the right image for the occasion (e.g. size of screen and bandwidth available). They all do things a bit differently. To keep track, Christopher Schmitt and I have created this spreadsheet of techniques.

Picturefill is a JavaScript file (or a polyfill to be more specific) that enables support for the picture element and associated features in browsers that do not yet support them, so you can start using them today! Picturefill is developed and maintained by Filament Group, with help from the members of the Responsive Images Community Group and the developer community at large.

A group of developers working towards a client-side solution for delivering alternate image data based on device capabilities to prevent wasted bandwidth and optimize display for both screen and print.

Cédric Morin étudie une solution prête à l’emploi pour résoudre le casse-tête des Adaptive Images, adaptée aux sites dynamiques (une de plus, oui). Cette solution est complexe, mais est prévue pour être complètement automatisable (comprenez industrialisable).

How is it different? Adaptive-Images aims to mitigate the problems inherent with Filament Group's method. It is designed to be entirely non-destructive so that it will work with any CMS or even with existing mark-up, without a need to edit anything. It creates and manages its own resized images using your existing images as the source, and it will adapt to the same resolution brackets your site does with the CSS3 @media queries used in your Responsive Design. It can do all of this because it already has the high resolution version to work on (it's the one referenced in the mark-up).

What is this all about? The goal of this technique is to deliver optimized, contextual image sizes for responsive layouts that utilize dramatically different image sizes at different resolutions. Ideally, this approach will allow developers to start with mobile-optimized images in their HTML and specify a larger size to be used for users with larger screen resolutions — without requesting both image sizes, and without UA sniffing.

Responsive or not, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t all be designing and building sites on flexible foundations.