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Barnaby

The more I read about responsive images, the more I think three things. Firstly:

Some desktop users are still on dial up or low end broadband (like me). I in fact get better transfer speeds using the 3G on my iPad than I do using my home wifi. Why should image file size be proportional to browser screen size, after all.

Second, surely if you have high resolution images, you should present a lower quality version and offer a larger version if requested regardless of platform.

Ad thirdly: I can’t help but think that this is one of those things that for some reason is trendy to talk about, and everyone’s trying to come up with more and more crazy solutions, none of which will be used in commercial projects and all of which will be thrown away when the browser makers offer us real, client and server side device feature detection.

(don’t get me wrong, I think they’re important thought experiments and fun to look at. But I don’t think we should be putting quite this much energy into it/taking it this seriously…)

I think there should be more focus on image optimisation and compression — non dirty things that actually work great and can be used right now. Using vectors is also an interesting topic.
I found out some interesting stuff in a recent project (e.g. Watercolours compress wonderfully, let’s start a trend away from gradients and towards paint!), so I’ll start writing about that.