Elements vs. attributes: the battle continues

["Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>]

I'm generally appalled by people who think processing elements is hard. 
I'm also weirdly amused to see that people most of us trust to get 
things right seem so clueless.

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The outcome of the meeting was that <picture> isn’t a viable option. 
Browser makers don’t like the fact that it’s a new element that does the 
same as <img> (or what <img> should do if we were speccing it today), 
and that it depends on multiple nested children. I’d based this on the 
HTML5 <video> and <source> pattern, but Ian Hickson already said “we 
learnt with <video> and <source> that having multiple elements for 
selecting a resource is a huge design pitfall”.

....

[srcSet attribute]

A representative of Apple called src-N‘s use of multiple attribute “a 
grotesque perversion of the HTML language“, which implies they’re not 
eager to implement it. (We’ll ignore the irony that the company which 
gave us a meta tag in HTML to control presentation is accusing others of 
perverting HTML).

<http://html5doctor.com/responsive-images-end-of-year-report/>
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My broad take is that browser vendors went badly overboard in optimizing 
performance by pre-fetching resources from anything that looked like a 
URL.  Their premature pre-fetching optimization is likely to give us all 
stupidly awful markup as a result.

As the HTML5doctor concludes:

"Our doctors’ report: must try harder."

Thanks,
--
Simon St.Laurent
http://simonstl.com/