![]() image reduction by techniques such as cropping and rotation - not merely scaling. Adaptive Images works great for scaling down images, but it’s also handy for when large images need art direction, i.e. It also does not rely on any UA sniffing but instead checks for the screen width. It uses a PHP and nginx configured server. It does not require any special markup but instead uses a small JavaScript file and does most of the heavy work in its back-end file. Adaptive Images is a great solution for those preferring a back-end responsive image fix. However, some server-side solutions are worthy of consideration. And of course, this doesn’t even take into account the unreliability of easily-spoofed UA strings in the first place. New UA strings keep popping up all the time, making it strenuous to maintain and update a comprehensive list. However, any developer can attest how unreliable this solution can be. So, what’s a website to do? Back-End Responsive Image Scaling Solutionsīarring mobile-only sites/sub-domains, we are left with sniffing user-agent (UA) and using it to serve the correctly sized images back to the user. The CSS-only technique only works for images intended as background images because these can be set within the stylesheet (using media queries). Instead of ignoring the large images intended for desktops, we end up having downloaded all images and resulting in an even larger page load. To make the page render fast enough, the browser pre-fetches linked content before even the necessary stylesheets and JavaScript files are fully loaded. However, browsers are optimized beyond common logic. This way the browser can ignore all the images not displayed and, in theory, not download them. It has no way of determining the correct type of image needed without any add-ons.Ĭan’t we just have all the image sizes included in the HTML, and use CSS rules to display:none for all but the correct image? That is the most logical solution in a perfect logical world. The tag has only the source attribute linking directly to the image itself. To discuss these responsive image solutions, we need to first understand the current image linking shortcomings. Several attempts have been made to simplify responsive design image resizing, including, both server-side and front-end solutions. With images taking among the largest shares of page content data, it becomes a priority to reduce this load. Over 20% of web traffic is now mobile users, and the number is still rising. (Not every site has the ability to afford this route.) On the Quest for Responsive Web ImagesĪt this point, developers and designers have to ensure their website load is optimized to meet the users who are on mobile sites. Earlier solutions addressed this by deploying mobile-only subdomains (and redirects) but this increased complexity and fell out of fashion quickly. Google has started to highlight mobile-friendly sites on its search results, with some speculating that it will lead to a substantial pagerank boost to such sites. Things like data plans and processing speed have to be considered as well. Users on smart phones are different to users on desktops. ![]() This not only brings up the question of displaying the content correctly, but also how the content itself is consumed using different devices. While it can be almost trivial to accommodate textual information, the tricky part comes when we put into consideration content like responsive images, infographics, videos, an so forth, which were once designed with only desktops in mind. However, this responsive web design evolution has proven to be a difficult and sometimes painful one. Instead of designing content to fit desktop or laptops, information has to be available for mobile phones, tablets or any surface connected to the web. This is the challenge of making the web work on most, if not all, devices without degrading the user’s experience. ![]() However, devising tools to meet the challenges of this phenomenon brings a whole new set of problems, with one of the latest buzzwords to emerge being “responsive web”. As mobile and tablet devices come closer to achieving final world domination, web design and technology is in a race to accommodate the ever-growing number of screen sizes. ![]()
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