Ughck. Images. – daverupert.com

Lots has happened in the world of Responsive Images since I wrote Mo’ Pixels, Mo’ Problems. And by lots, I mean nothing at all. It’s been over a year since The Great WHATWG Responsive Image Debacle and we’re still at square one.

Browsers want to implement srcset because “it’s easy”, but lots of developers (myself included) would feel great about using <picture> because it looks like every other new media syntax (audio & video) as well as a plethora of other reasons too. There have been a few more creative hacks (Compressive Images, Clown Car, etc) but no gold standard has arisen.

Here are some other developments you should care about:

• The average web page in June 2013 is 1426kb. 60% (891kb) of that is images.1
• Steve Souders notes that responsive images break the preloader.
• Tim Kadlec argues responsive images could reduce image asset weight by 72%.
• Google recommends using WebP, a great format, but it only works in their rendering engine.
• Progressive JPEGs are a web performance best practice even though support seems to be desktop-only. Progressive JPEGs aren’t a complete mobile solution because, if implemented, they’d make extra requests to cell towers.