You’re arguing that the web should degrade to almost pure text with links to bandwidth-heavy, rich, much-harder-to-adapt-to-different-devices-than-a-block-of-text resources. And that depending on the device’s capabilities, let’s progressively load-in-place and enhance those resources from there.
I’m probably guilty of hearing “rich media doesn’t belong on the web” when you’ve actually been saying “rich media needs to degrade gracefully on the web.” Which of course is what we all want, and what we’re all here for.
One thing I hope everyone can agree on: rich media has been and will continue to be essential to the web.
I disagree that the tools we have to do this sort of progressive enhancement now are at all adequate or that their limits are acceptable or embraceable.
I don’t want to have to be careful, or clever. When I speak of making images first class citizens, I’m envisioning being able to produce, publish, and consume them as thoughtlessly as people publish <p>s, leaving browsers and devices to do the heavy lifting of progressive enhancement, deciding how many bits to move across the wire & how many pixels to push to the screen, such that users get the best possible experience. Right now this onus is put on users (see: flickr pages providing links to images at a range of resolutions) or developers (see: a thousand hacky javascripts & server-side solutions blooming.)
Eric Portis
@Paul Lloyd
That makes alot of sense, actually.
You’re arguing that the web should degrade to almost pure text with links to bandwidth-heavy, rich, much-harder-to-adapt-to-different-devices-than-a-block-of-text resources. And that depending on the device’s capabilities, let’s progressively load-in-place and enhance those resources from there.
I’m probably guilty of hearing “rich media doesn’t belong on the web” when you’ve actually been saying “rich media needs to degrade gracefully on the web.” Which of course is what we all want, and what we’re all here for.
One thing I hope everyone can agree on: rich media has been and will continue to be essential to the web.
I disagree that the tools we have to do this sort of progressive enhancement now are at all adequate or that their limits are acceptable or embraceable.
I don’t want to have to be careful, or clever. When I speak of making images first class citizens, I’m envisioning being able to produce, publish, and consume them as thoughtlessly as people publish <p>s, leaving browsers and devices to do the heavy lifting of progressive enhancement, deciding how many bits to move across the wire & how many pixels to push to the screen, such that users get the best possible experience. Right now this onus is put on users (see: flickr pages providing links to images at a range of resolutions) or developers (see: a thousand hacky javascripts & server-side solutions blooming.)
Can’t wait to see your code!