Short description: Picture is absolutely shipping in Opera 25 and Chrome 38 and I make a number of questionable music references.
Mamma don't take my code-a-Chrome-38
With the necessary responsive-element foundations laid, Yoav posted an “intent to ship” thread re: the picture element over on the Blink-dev mailing list this week; the feature received the necessary support. Meaning that, barring any crazybugs, meteor strikes or other such unforeseen calamities, the picture element is finally, officially, definitely going to ship un-flagged in Chrome 38 (in late September/early October) and Opera 25. Canary builds from here on out will support the feature by default, too.
Much implementation work remains to be done. picture, srcset, and sizes have been fully implemented in Gecko but are still behind flags in Firefox Nightly. The WebKit implementation has a ways to go. We’re still waiting on an official “yes, we’re implementing this” from IE. And it will take a while for these features to trickle down to mobile browsers, where they’re needed most. But! It feels great to have one foot, firmly planted.
Le nozze di Figuring-out-the-new-markup-by-example-o
Andreas Bovens posted something great. I particularly like how he emphasizes the link between markup features and use-cases, and accompanies each example with a graphical key so that you can tell what problems the markup is trying to solve at a glance.
When linking to the article, Andreas’ fellow Opera employee (and picture element sorta-kinda-inventor) Bruce Lawson offered these words of encouragement:
if my dull brain can understand it, yours can.
The W3C Validator now accepts and provides helpful advice on the new markup.
We’re re-printing the RICG tees over at Cotton Bureau. Sale ends August 5th!
Mat Marquis wrote a Chrome extension which calls out pages using picture with a little badge (of approval, presumably). It’s called “Picture in Play”. Mike Taylor quickly coded-up a Firefox add-on that does the same thing; they both live in this GitHub repository.
♫ the light, the heat ♫
Finally, as the RICG begins to look beyond responsive images – to element queries, and beyond – we realize that we need a new name. Or at least a new “I.” We’ve set up a suggestion box here.
And yes, “Insaneclownposse” has already been suggested.
See you in a couple of weeks!
—eric