Microsoft, WordPress, and the HTML spec, oh my!
picture is officially “In Development” on Microsoft’s official status page. Even better: the latest Microsoft Edge build now supports w descriptors and sizes! Go Redmond, go.
The official responsive images plugin for WordPress currently sports “10,000+” active installs. Joe McGill recently penned a post over on the WordPress Core blog about the effort to land the plugin’s functionality in Core, so that all million-bajillion of WordPress’ users will get respimg functionality automatically.
Joe outlines the issues left to conquer (and there are more than a few of them — WordPress’ image-handling is old, stable, and resistant to change), and calls on all interested to contribute. Contribute!
Jason Grigsby has completed his stupendous Responsive Images 101 series with a pair of posts: one on image breakpoints, the other, a conclusion.
Jason has thought about image breakpoints more than anyone — I’m pretty sure he coined the term? — and it shows. After outlining the problem and a bunch of different ways to think about tackling it, Jason ends with a section called “Humans shouldn’t be doing this” and a plea for developers and CMSs to shield content creators from having to do the confounding, tedious work of creating and managing multiple alternate image resources.
The conclusion to the series is excellent. Jason celebrates how far responsive images have come, touches on a bunch of possible “201” topics, and implores us all to “Please share what you learn!” Hear, hear!
The WHATWG HTML spec moved from its lonely SVN server over to GitHub over the weekend. To date, Ian Hickson, WHATWG editor, has used a build script to pull picture from the RICG’s repo into the published WHATWG spec. As a result of the move, that workflow is being tossed. Henceforth, picture and friends will live in the WHATWG HTML repo, just like everything else.
Our venerable picture-element repository will live on for history, but all of the action is moving to the WHATWG HTML spec repo on GitHub. So if you’ve got a bug: file it there.
See you in a couple of weeks!
—eric