Responsive Images in D8

A few months ago I wrote about how combining the picture element module with the breakpoints module can help you manage images in a responsive Drupal 7 website more efficiently. As a follow up, I wanted to write about how Responsive Images has evolved within the Drupal ecosystem. This time however, the focus will be on Drupal 8— though most of what I will cover also applies to Drupal 7 with some minor differences.

There are two noticeable changes in Drupal 8 related to Responsive Images

• The picture element module is now called Responsive Images
• Both Responsive Images and the Breakpoints module are part of D8’s core (they are contributed modules in D7).

In earlier versions of the Responsive Images module (D8), and Picture module (D7), the only option for serving different images to different devices was to use the media attribute, which meant using media queries for detecting the device size. Although this works pretty well, the device’s size alone should not be the only criteria for serving images. The scenario that always comes to mind for this technique is that if I am using a laptop with a poor or unreliable wifi connection, I will still be served a large or high resolution image because my screen size is large. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to detect other conditions when determining which image to serve to a device? Conditions such as connection speed, viewport size and screen density? Even better, wouldn’t it be nice if you could provide the browser with information about your images that normally would be unknown to the browser?

One of the biggest issues with images is the fact that the browser does not know the size or rendering information in relation to the viewport until the images, CSS or JS are fully loaded. Browsers can’t know anything about a website that they haven’t loaded yet. But they’re constantly aware of the environment they’re rendering within: the size of the viewport, the resolution of the user’s screen, that kind of thing. The idea of media queries is this: let web developers do specific things for specific environments. If the viewport is wider than a thousand pixels, then show the sidebar to the left. Otherwise, push it below our main content. If the user’s screen is retina, then use a big image. Otherwise, use a smaller one.

When using media queries alone, we are still telling the browser what image to serve based on the device size. It’s time we provide the browser with options and let it make the decision.

Identifying the gap between what the browser knows and doesn’t know at time of rendering:

As you can see from the table above, the browser is aware of viewport dimensions as well as screen density. However, the browser is not aware of how large images need to be rendered in relation to the viewport, or the actual physical file dimensions.

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