On Aug 7, 2012, at 3:09 PM, Ian Hickson wrote: > On Tue, 15 May 2012, Matthew Wilcox wrote: >> >> I do not see much potential for srcset. The result of asking the author >> community was overwhelmingly negative, indirection or no indirection. > > I'm happy to consider specific feedback, but at the time in this thread > where this e-mail was sent, We had yet to receive any negative commentary > at all on the mailing list, so this seems a bit vague. :-)
A great deal of author feedback was posted to http://www.w3.org/community/respimg/2012/05/11/respimg-proposal/, the link to which was posted to the mailing list several times. You’ll notice that the comments are nearly unanimous. At the time this was posted the CG sites were taken down due to excessive traffic, as authors sounded off on the subject. There was also no small measure of relief from the #whatwg regulars once the IRC traffic died down, as I recall. Prominent members of the developer community haven’t been terribly subtle in their opinions of the markup, either: https://twitter.com/zeldman/status/233232252111302657 When the syntax is the butt of jokes at high-profile conferences, it might be time to accept that we authors aren’t especially partial to it. If you’d prefer I instruct the developer community to comment on this thread instead, I’m happy to do so. If author sentiment was somehow ignored the first time, though — if it either went wholly unnoticed by the decision-makers, or is now being disregarded due to where those sentiments were posted — I don’t see where it will change much apart from several hundred more emails to prove a fairly self-evident point. Since author preference has been cited several times in support of the terseness of the extended `srcset` syntax, I think it’s probably best that we not discount the methods by which authors voice their own preference if the real goal is an author-friendly pattern — unless we’re dismissing the “authors will prefer the shorter syntax” argument as well. Perhaps that would be the second best course of action here. Mat Marquis
