Tags: respimg

Keep ’em Separated — ericportis.com

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.

Responsive Images: If you’re just changing resolutions, use srcset. | CSS-Tricks

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.

» Don’t use <picture> (most of the time) Cloud Four Blog

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.