@Nicolas Chevallier,

Like Matt said, I’d love to see your alternative.

I did a lot of research into this problem. The issues are outlined here:
http://www.cloudfour.com/responsive-imgs/

I examined nineteen different techniques as part of my research on responsive images:
http://www.cloudfour.com/responsive-imgs-part-2

A Google Spreadsheet containing all of the different techniques and my analysis using a proxy server to watch asset loading can be found at the bottom of the second link.

It is entirely possible that everyone has missed a simple and obvious solution. If so, please publish it. We’d welcome it and thank you profusely.

But given the amount of time people have put into solving this problem, it is likely that there isn’t a great solution.

Matt’s solution may be a hack, but that’s all we’ve got at the moment. Adaptive images is one of the best solutions I reviewed and probably the easiest for people to implement.

Thanks Matt for a great article and for continuing to try to improve techniques for images in responsive designs.

-Jason