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Internet Explorer is implementing srcset with x descriptors.
This is huge news; it means that x descriptors have or will soon come to every major browser.
w descriptors, sizes, picture, and all of the rest are still officially “under consideration” (and not “in development”), but from the looks of it this represents a firmly planted first step on the path towards a full respimg implementation in IE.
(And it certainly doesn’t hurt the RICG’s unofficial 1% in 2014 campaign.)
Here’s a video recap of Dave Newton’s September talk at Accessibility Camp Toronto. Respimg discussions start at the eight minute mark; Newtron takes center stage from 9:22–16:50. The talk and the interview are great, and hey! Nice shirt!
And apparently Yoav brought the house down at SmashingConf Whistler this past week. “Responsive images are coming here!” Yoav’s slides are here.
I was pleasantly surprised by the comments on my recent A List Apart respimg article. I’d braced myself for a lot of criticism and complaint, but almost every comment concerned implementing and automating all of this new markup. Myriad dev environments and CMSes are going to require myriad tutorials and implementation recaps; Aaron Gustafson has written a great one about his recent experiences implementing respimg with ExpressionEngine on the Nichols College site.
Ian Devlin did some walking and talking this week, on the subject of providing multiple, alternate captions for art-directed images. Personally I’m a bit ambivalent about this, but Ian’s article (and polyfill!) make a strong case.
Finally, element query talk is still rumbling along. Minutes from a recent RICG conference call indicate that there is some consensus within the group on how to deal with the feature’s inherent circular dependency issues, and that Tab is getting ready to start a syntax discussion thread on www-style. That should be fun.
See you in a couple of weeks!
—eric