Mat “Wilto” Marquis is a former amateur boxer, aspiring chef, halfway decent carpenter, and passable antique British motorcycle mechanic—when not making fast, accessible, responsive websites. He keeps busy.
As chair of the Responsive Issues Community Group, Mat spearheaded the effort to bring native responsive image solutions to the HTML5 specification, later going on to facilitate browser implementations and oversee the addition of native responsive image techniques to major CMSes. Mat has has been a member of the jQuery Team, spoken at An Event Apart, edited for A List Apart, and published both JavaScript for Web Designers and Image Performance with A Book Apart. He even appeared in the film What Comes Next is the Future, discussing his role in web standards. He has an IMDB page to show for it and everything!
An old cliché says that “may you get everything you wish for” makes for a particularly insidious curse. As all the other browsers got easier and easier to deal with, Mat Marquis attempted to convince himself that there was at least still a challenge to quirky old IE. That even became something of a point of pride: he had gotten so good at fixing obscure IE issues that he’d learned to dodge them during the course of my everyday development, leaving nothing to dread come the big “open it up in IE and see what broke” phase. With Edge soon making the switch to Chrome’s rendering engine — well, for better or worse, a bitter wish is coming true.
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While srcset as implemented by WebKit doesn’t address to all the responsive images use cases, it does represent a major step toward a long overdue solution—hopefully the first of many. And as Chair of the W3C’s Responsive Images Community Group, Mat Marquis has been dreading this moment for some time now. Pertaining to “responsive images”: it’s complicated, and it can be hard keeping up with the signal in all the noise. Here’s what you need to know.
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