TL;DR
I both love and hate animated Gifs.
Safari Tech Preview has changed all of this. Now I love and love animated “Gifs”.
Animated Gifs are a hack. To quote from the original Gif89a specification:
Welcome to the latest edition of the Responsive Images Guide!
In part 1, I laid out the big idea: a responsive image is a variable image – which adjusts itself to fit variable contexts.
In part 2, we looked at the most common way that an image can do exactly that: scaling itself up and down to fit viewports of different sizes and screens with different densities.
As a developer, it seems inefficient to serve a 2000kb JPEG image when we could compress images to optimize the performance without degrading the visual quality.
We are not new to this kind of responsibility. But our productivity will end up being questioned if we do not deliver fast. In order to do so, the community has devised several patterns to help improve productivity. Let's review few of these patterns based on their categories:
You might have read some tutorials or articles explaining the importance of images and how to optimize them to deliver a great experience to your users. But does this work really translate into wins for your company? In this talk, you see real-world examples of the positive impact that image optimizations can have on metrics that your bosses and clients care about. You will walk away from this talk with compelling data and useful tools to help you get buy-in and support for this important user experience work at your company.
There’s no debating the fact that including images on your website or mobile app draws the interest of users and leads to stronger engagement. For example, posts that include images produce 650 percent higher engagement than text-only posts, according to a WebDAM infographic. Use of attention-grabbing images is only going to grow. Consider that by 2018, 84 percent of communication will be visual, the infographic noted.
In Part 1 of this series, I discussed (rather abstractly) what it means for an image to be “responsive.” In short, a responsive image is a variable image that adapts to fit variable contexts, in order to provide a great experience to users no matter what their screen, browser, network connection, or device may be.
The night was moist. Angular2 had just been released and developers all over the world were asking for an integrated image management solution.
Cloudinary heeded the call and is proud to present the new Angular2 SDK, providing directives for displaying and transforming images and video with an API.
“Responsive.” Where did that term come from, anyways?
In his sea-changing essay, Responsive Web Design, Ethan Marcotte explained:
Recently, an emergent discipline called “responsive architecture” has begun asking how physical spaces can respond to the presence of people passing through them. Through a combination of embedded robotics and tensile materials, architects are experimenting with art installations and wall structures that bend, flex, and expand as crowds approach them. … rather than creating immutable, unchanging spaces … inhabitant and structure can—and should—mutually influence each other.
Even though websites have changed dramatically over the years – from simple text-based pages to advanced in-browser apps full of images and videos – the underlying HTTP protocol really hasn’t changed - until recently, with the approval of the HTTP/2 protocol by the IETF. Today Cloudinary is proud to announce, as part of a CDN infrastructure upgrade, general availability of HTTP/2 support in our image and video management solution. This will help you optimize the user experience on your app or website even more.