Tags: sizes

Designing better target sizes

This is a wonderfully in-depth interactive explainer on touch target sizes, with plenty of examples.

Sizes=”auto” pretty much requires width and height attributes — ericportis.com

Huh! I did not know this. Good to know!

Intent to Ship: Auto Sizes for Lazy Loaded Images with Srcset

Remember when I wrote about sizes="auto"? Well, it’s coming to Chrome! Hallelujah!

As well as her personal site, wordridden.com, Jessica also has a professional site, lostintranslation.com.

Both have been online for a very long time. Jessica’s professional site pre-dates the Sofia Coppola film of the same name, which explains how she was able to get that domain name.

Thanks to the internet archive, you can see what lostintranslation.com looked like more than twenty years ago. The current iteration of the site still shares some of that original design DNA.

The most recent addition to the site is a collection of images on the front page: the covers of books that Jessica has translated during her illustrious career. It’s quite an impressive spread!

I used a combination of CSS grid and responsive images to keep the site extremely performant. That meant using a combination of the picture element, source elements, srcset attributes, and the sizes attribute.

That last part always feels weird. I have to tell the browser what sizes the images will displayed at, which can change depending on the viewport width. But I’ve already given that information in the CSS! It feels weird to have to repeat that information in the HTML.

It’s not just about the theoretical niceties of DRY: Don’t Repeat Yourself. There’s the very practical knock-on effects of having to update the same information in two places. If I update the CSS, I need to remember to update the HTML too. Those concerns no longer feel all that separate.

But I get it. Browsers use a look-ahead parser to start downloading images as soon as possible, so I understand why I need to explicitly state what size the images will be displayed at. Still, it feels like something that a computer should be calculating, not something for a human to list out by hand.

But wait! Most of the images on that page also have a loading attribute with a value of “lazy”. That tells browsers they don’t have to download the images immediately. That sort of negates the look-ahead parser.

That’s why the HTML spec now includes a value for the sizes attribute of “auto”. It’s only supposed to be used in conjunction with loading="lazy" (otherwise it means 100vw).

Browser makers are on board with this. You can track the implementation progress for Chromium, WebKit, and Firefox.

I would very much like to see this become a reality!

The ideal viewport doesn’t exist

Some lovely scroll-driven animations illustrate this great little microsite.

There’s something very pleasy about the chunky design that harkens back to the Zeldmanesque early web.

Some simple ways to make content look good - Set Studio

This is a terrific walkthrough from Andy showing how smart fundamentals in your CSS can give you a beautiful readable document without much work.

On Container Queries, Responsive Images, and JPEG-XL – Cloud Four

Container queries can’t be used in the sizes attribute for responsive images. Here, Jason breaks down why that is (spoiler: it’s the lookahead pre-parser) and segues into a truly long term solution: a “magical” image format.

If you’ve ever thought it felt weird to put media conditions inside the HTML for responsive images, this will resonate.

Fluid type sizes and spacing — Piper Haywood

Prompted by Utopia, Piper shares her methodology for fluid type in Sass.

HTML Video Sources Should Be Responsive | Filament Group, Inc.

Removing media support from HTML video was a mistake.

Damn right! It was basically Hixie throwing a strop, trying to sabotage responsive images. Considering how hard it is usually to remove a shipped feature from browsers, it’s bizarre that a good working feature was pulled out of production.

AddyOsmani.com - Preload late-discovered Hero images faster

Did you know there’s an imagesrcset attribute you can put on link rel="preload" as="image" (along with an imagesizes attribute)?

I didn’t. (Until Amber pointed this out.)

A Guide to the Responsive Images Syntax in HTML | CSS-Tricks

Chris has put together one of his indispensable deep dives, this time into responsive images. I can see myself referring back to this when I need to be reminded of the syntax of srcset and sizes.

Responsive Images the Simple Way - Cloud Four

A nice succint explanation of using the srcset and sizes attributes on the img element—remember, you probably don’t need picture and source elements if your use case is swapping out different sized versions of the same image.

One caveat thought: you do need to know the dimensions of the images. If you’re dealing with unknown or user-generated photos, that can be an issue.

Dimensions.Guide | Database of Dimensioned Drawings

There’s something quite lovely about this site, both in its purpose and execution.

Dimensions.Guide is a comprehensive reference database of dimensioned drawings documenting the standard measurements and sizes of the everyday objects and spaces that make up our world. Created as a universal resource to better communicate the basic properties, systems, and logics of our built environment, Dimensions.Guide is a free platform for increasing public and professional knowledge of life and design.

Responsive Images on the Apple Watch — ericportis.com

Some tips for getting responsive images to work well on the Apple Watch:

• test your layouts down to 136-px wide
• include 300w-ish resources in your full-width img’s srcsets
• art direct to keep image subjects legible
• say the magic meta words

Pixels vs. Ems: Users DO Change Font Size – Evan Minto – Medium

I have to admit, I didn’t realise that text reszing behaved differently for user preferences compared to page zoom. For that reason alone, I’m going to avoid setting font sizes in pixels.

If 2 to 3% (or more!) of your users are relying on a custom font size, you should know that so you can either support that user preference or make a conscious decision to not support it. Doing anything less is frankly irresponsible, especially considering that users with larger font sizes may be using those sizes to compensate for visual disabilities.

Swapping Images with the Sizes Attribute | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA

The hits just keep on coming from the Filament Group. Here Scott shares a really clever technique for creating an image magnifier using the sizes attribute of the img element.

Keep ’em Separated — ericportis.com

I share the concerns expressed here about the “sizes” attribute that’s part of the new turbo-powered img element (or “the picture element and its associates”, if you prefer). Putting style or layout information into HTML smells bad.

This is a concern that Matt Wilcox has raised:

Change the design and those breakpoints are likely to be wrong. So you’ll need to change all of the client-side mark-up that references images.

I can give you a current use-case: right here on adactio.com, you can change the stylesheet …so I can’t embed breakpoints or sizes into my img elements because—quite rightly—there’s a separation between the structural HTML layer and the presentational CSS layer.

» Don’t use <picture> (most of the time) Cloud Four Blog

Jason points out that the picture element might not be needed for most responsive image use cases; the srcset and sizes attributes will probably be enough—that’s what I’m doing for the photos on my site.

Responsive design testing tool – Viewport Resizer

A handy little bookmarklet for quickly checking how a site might look at different screen sizes, and you can customise it to use whichever screen sizes you like.

Responsive Design Testing

Another browser-based tool for viewing the same site at different sizes, but this one displays them all the same time, side by side.