RICG-newsletter-2014-09-19.html

<dl>

<dt>Subject:</dt>
<dd>What a difference a year makes</dd>

<dt>Teaser text:</dt>
<dd>Talk slides, platform tests, a new tutorial, and memories.</dd>

</dl>

<h1>One year</h1>

<blockquote>
  <p>One year ago today, we held a @respimg browser-vendor meetup at Paris. We left it with an "all is lost" kinda feeling. Funny how things go.</p>
<footer><cite>—<a href="https://twitter.com/yoavweiss/status/509713788539764736">@yoavweiss</a></cite></footer>
</blockquote>

<p>Indeed. I remember waking up at an ungodly hour, half a world away from <a href="http://www.w3.org/community/respimg/2013/09/18/paris-responsive-images-meetup/">that meetup</a>, making myself a strong pot of tea, struggling to open the live stream, and proceeding to hear browser vendor after browser vendor mistake pieces of the responsive images problem for the whole and/or put the kibosh on a multi-element markup solution. I lobbed a few Qs from the peanut gallery (IRC room) before shuffling off to work, groggily consoling myself that, “well, at least we’ll have srcset=1x/2x.”</p>

<p>Fast forward to the present day. The RICG’s humble <code>picture</code> repo is now being piped directly into the official specs. The spec’s first full implementation ships (in Chrome 38) in a week or three. The RICG is being widely hailed as a success and a template – a place where developers, spec editors, and browser vendors all came together to understand each other’s pain points and make the web a better place.</p>

<p>The big, open questions are no longer about what the new markup should <em>be</em>, or how it should <em>work</em>, but about how <a href="https://shoehornwithteeth.com/ramblings/2014/09/potential-browser-devtools-support-for-responsive-images/">dev</a> <a href="https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=415147">tools</a> should <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1064715">present it</a>.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/responsive/picture-element/">New tutorials</a> are being posted every week (and, if you’ll excuse a little horn-tooting, <a href="http://terkel.github.io/srcset-sizes/">an old one was just translated into Japanese!</a>). <a href="http://blog.cloudfour.com/updating-responsive-image-guidelines-in-preparation-for-aea-austin/">Jason Grigsby has ceased advising conference rooms full of people to hedge their responsive image bets</a> and Bruce Lawson is already <a href="https://twitter.com/brucel/status/510026698939969536">casting</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/brucel/status/510028240413798401">the</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/brucel/status/510029214733840385">movie</a>.</p>

<p>Editor Simon Pieter’s focus has shifted from ironing out all of the little devils in the details of the spec to ensuring that those details are implemented correctly; he’s been busy building <a href="https://github.com/w3c/web-platform-tests/pull/1234">a suite of Web Platform Tests</a>.</p>

<p>And now that the new markup in browsers and specs, all that’s left is the enormous task of getting it into as many <em>webpages</em> as possible, via developer evangelization and education. I mentioned a couple of newsletters ago that various RICG-folk had talks in September; slides from <a href="https://speakerdeck.com/newtron/improving-performance-with-responsive-images-nagw">Dave Newton’s (excellent) talk at the National Association of Government Web Professionals</a> and <a href="https://github.com/ResponsiveImagesCG/newsletters/issues/57">Yoav’s (stellar) talk at Velocity</a> are now both available online.</p>

<p>What a difference a year makes.</p>

<p>See you in a couple of weeks!</p>

<p>—eric</p>