Any compatibility issues with RICG Responsive Images or Resposify WP Plugin?

Hello,

WP Retina 2x follows the natural flow of WordPress image sizes. Those plugins are a bit different in the way they operate. I checked what they do but I am not really clear on what happens exactly and it would never cover all cases.

Mmm… I guess you should go for one way or another?

Thanks, Jordy, for your fast reply!

Well, I am just on diving a bit deeper into the responsive and Retina image topic. And it seems that you are right: it wouldn’t be really necessary to combine your plugin with those for responsive images mentioned above. They do more or less the same as your plugin does, except from creating the needed image sizes. This has to be done before uploading the image files by setting the correct values at add_image_size in the function.php

Please, correct me if I am wrong!

To summarize what I read about this after I posted my question above:
As far as I understood well, the RICG and Responsify WP Plugins all work with either the img-tag and srcset/size attribute or the picture-element (with or without polyfill for older browser support). According to caniuse.com, srcset has actually a better browser support than the picture element. With <img> and “srcset/size” there is also a native fallback solution when including “src” in the code (which is also necessary in terms of code validation). So, no polyfill needed really. The RICG plugin makes use of src-fallback whereas the Responsify WP does not.

So, if I’ve set up all needed image sizes for upload in my function.php – including high resolution images for Retina desplays -, I should be able to serve every needed resolution for every device or screen size, either Retina or not, just with <img> and the srcset- and size-attribute and let the browser decide, which image to load.

May be you know this article by Cris Coyier from last year, which explains it quite well. Or, if you know a bit of German, there is another more comprehensive article here.

I think, I will give the RICG Plugin a trial. But thank you very much for your time and support!

I find “responsive” a very, extremely difficult matter. I actually thought about adding the “response” feature in the plugin after implementing it more or less manually on one website. My experience wasn’t really good. Sure it was fancy and seems nice at first but… I realized it would be a pain to maintain it in the future. And potentially such a pain that it would be almost impossible. And now I wonder why people go for “responsive”, it seems more like a marketing term and technologically “sounds nice” kind of trick.

But actually, there are only two types of device for me: tablet and bigger or mobile. Best is not to be responsive but to have two different themes (or a theme and a child theme) depending on the device. It’s so much easier, gives you so much more power on making the website more adapted to the device. I do this with all my blogs/websites.

For simple and little blogs, it’s okay to be responsive. For bigger and serious websites, different themes are better, easier to maintain, and can adapt themselves much better to the devices.

And to be honest, I don’t feel like having 5 or 6 different sizes in my src-set. I love it as a concept but it is over-engineering the issue.

Oh, and those plugins seem to handle retina through adding new image sizes. This is really wrong from my point of view. Retina images should be in the shadow of the original images. What if we have 2.5x, 3x, 4x? One day when you will add an image to your post you will have the choice between 15 or more image sizes, even though you actually can only use 5.

You are definitely right. I don’t like the idea neither to have one site for a more and more growing range of different devices and resolutions. I really would prefer your approach with two designs instead. But I have to stick to those decisions taken this time for this actual project and make the best out of it…

Btw, my hope is that this mobile hype will get to it’s peak very soon and that a growing part of us will be very happy to limit our online life time to a certain amount and a certain place during the day in about five or ten years or so! In any case, I definitely prefer any internet PC over any mobile device! Maybe I am old school… But the more mobile shining virtual reality and that stuff, the more we are going to realise for sure how precious real life and some flowing imperfectness is at the end, don’t we? Ten years ago nobody was thinking that dead analogue photography will resurrect once. And it did! Today it’s back again… Just to give some example. High tech will push low tech back again…
But this is really of-topic now ??

Btw, my hope is that this mobile hype will get to it’s peak very soon and that a growing part of us will be very happy to limit our online life time to a certain amount and a certain place during the day in about five or ten years or so!

100% agree with you. To be old school is not a bad thing if you aren’t an old grumpy grandpa. We still have the ability to compare the now and the back then for a little while so let’s do it! ??

It’s really off-off topic now but I am also a photographer and I couldn’t understand how some people would be still shooting film. Until I bought myself a Rolleiflex and felt in love with it! This is not even my parents generation! ??