Teaser: Does everybody know what time it is?
If I’ve had a mantra in this newsletter for the past few months, it's that now that we’ve managed to get respimg into specs and browsers, the final step in respimg-ifying the web is to get responsive images into as many webpages as possible. The best way to do that is tooling, and this newsletter is full of it.
That’s the day that responsive images will ship in WordPress core, as the marquee feature of version 4.4 (currently in beta). The team is making some final tweaks to the platform to prepare the way; Joe McGill recently appeared on the WP Tavern podcast to explain how it all works.
WordPress may be the web’s largest CMS, but it’s not the only one — a new, excellent-looking respimg plugin for Kirby appeared the other week. And it looks like the jekyll-picture-tag plugin for Jekyll will soon be boarding the srcset, w, and sizes bandwagon.
Responsive image CMS integrations do two things. First, they generate and manage multiple sizes/versions of your “master” image files. Second, they generate the respimg markup that’ll be used within the context of the CMS.
What if you just want the first part of that – the image-management bit, without the markup (or the tie-in to a particular CMS)?
Never fear, The Cloud™ is here! Mike Engel wrote a thing about pairing cloud-based image hosts with respimg markup. I’ve been experimenting with the services he talks about recently and can report that having a fully-featured, well-maintained CMS/API for just your images … well let’s just say it has some nice benefits vs. the bespoke ImageMagick, Ruby, duct-tape, and wishes-based workflow that I, personally, have been using for the past couple of years. Upload a high-res file once, and use it (with a few URL parameters to handle the scaling/cropping/format-conversion) anywhere.
And the services that Mike mentions are moving fast: Imgix just added bleeding-edge Client Hints support.
The venerable JPEG format — a 20+ year old “alien technology from the future” — still rules the web. It’s efficient, universal, and patent-and-DRM-free.
Bad news: the committee in charge of JPEG is “investigating solutions that will empower end-users to protect their privacy” AKA adding a DRM extension to the web’s primary image format. The EFF (god love ’em) attended the latest JPEG meeting to tell them exactly why that’s such a terrible idea. Here’s hoping the presentation didn’t fall on deaf ears.
JPEG is old; WebP and JPEG-XR are shiny and new. After years of stagnation, progress in the image format space seems to be accelerating; here are two even newer formats that have popped up on my radar in the last few weeks:
- FLIF features world-beating lossless compression with a progressive loading scheme that they’re thinking some interesting thoughts about re: responsive images.
- HIMG offers JPEG-like compression on very-constrained hardware
Neat.
- Toot toot! What’s that sound? It’s my own horn! Because this here newsletter just passed the 1,000-subscriber mark. I owe all of you beers.
- Yoav went to TPAC.
- Use Node.js and need to automatically crop/art direct images? Smartcrop.js might be just what the doctor ordered.
- Speaking of art direction at scale — a couple of folks from Walmart Labs gave a great presentation on responsive hero images. I write a lot of words here about code, tools, and specs — this talk focuses on the much gnarlier problems of organizational process and people. A refreshing perspective and an informative talk; also includes some delightful Jason Grigsby/Rick Astley mashup gifs.
See you in a couple of weeks!
—eric