[webkit-dev] The SrcN responsive images proposal

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 5:03 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:
> Do you claim that using multiple numbered possibly out-of-order attributes as one level of list hierarchy is a smaller mental tax than an extra delimiter? Seems clearly the opposite to me.

Of course it does when you phrase one with an entire sentence and the
other as just an "extra delimiter". ^_^

Out-of-order attributes would of course be confusing.  There's no
reason for authors to do that on purpose, of course; they'd just be
confusing themselves.  The fact that it's *possible* for them to be
authored out-of-order isn't significant here, because there's no
*reason* to do so; all the attributes are specified in a single
location, so you don't even have the excuse of things being scattered
around the document.

Just talking about attributes vs delimiters, though, I explained in my
most recent email to Timothy why I believe the attribute separation
that src-N uses is significant.  It's not separate attributes *just*
because it's the second level of hierarchy; there's an important
difference in the sources specified in a single attribute.  Based on
my experiences giving talks and teaching the occasional class, I
believe that teaching the distinction of "all sources within a single
src-N attribute must be for the same image with different densities;
use different src-N attributes when you're trying to deliver different
images" is pretty simple; teaching the same thing, but about top-level
groups versus low-level groups will be more difficult.

~TJ