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24 ways to impress your friends

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Matt Wilcox

+1 for Mat and Grigs.

This is actually a good article, and all of the points are valid. The problem is they’re all old points that have been looked at in great detail already.

What the article misses – and it’s very easy to miss if you don’t read almost everything that’s been written on the topic – is why we have ended up with the two solutions we have. It’s not for lack of trying other options, including all of the very options that are mentioned, among others. It’s because the other options are even less viable or plain impossible (sizing images to their context is impossible, but we all agree that’s a far better approach).

I’m actually inclined to agree that both syntaxes are too verbose for general use. Even so, they have their places and they really are the best solutions we can realistically come up with.

I, for one, would love better ones. We’ve been looking for better ones. We haven’t found them.

As an aside: the entire issue would be fixed easilly using current tech if we had the ability to tell browsers to not pre-fetch images. i.e., behave as browsers used to. It’s actually the browser’s “performance enhancement” which is the problem here.