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Responsive Images 101, Part 3: Srcset Display Density

By Jason Grigsby

Published on March 18th, 2015

Topics

Ever since Apple launched a retina display on the iPhone 4, web designers have been looking for a way to handle high density displays. That is where srcset and its display density descriptors come in.

As a reminder, display density is a resolution switching use case. And when we’re solving for resolution switching, we want to use srcset.1

The reason why we want to use srcset is because it gives the browser choice. When we use the media attribute provided by the <picture> element, we’re dictating to the browser what image it must use. That makes sense for art direction.

But when it comes to resolution switching, the browser knows best what image will work. It can make decisions based on factors that we’re not privy to such as network conditions or user preference.

So unless we are doing art direction, we should strive to give the browser options and let it make smart decisions.

The syntax for display density is fairly straight forward:

srcset example repeated below

The srcset attribute is added to an <img> element. The value of srcset contains a comma-separated list. Each item in the list contains the path to an image and the density of that image provided as a multiple (e.g., 1x, 2x, 3x…).

<img src="cat.jpg" alt="cat" srcset="cat.jpg, cat-2X.jpg 2x">
Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

The display density values—the 1x, 2x, etc.—are referred to as display density descriptors. If a display density descriptor isn’t provided, it is assumed to be 1x.

It is easy—assuming all you care about is display density. I have my doubts about how often that will happen.

Let’s take a look at the Apple Watch image from Part 1:

Apple Watch Hero Image

As mentioned previously, the image is 5144×1698 pixels and 398K in its 2x incarnation. There is also a 1x version. Let’s compare them to the size that would make sense for a single density, Blackberry Curve 9310:

Image Width Height File Size
2x large 5144 1698 398K
1x large 2572 849 256K
320px, Single Density 320 106 8K

For the final row in the table, I resized the image to 320px wide and saved as a JPEG in order to estimate what it would be.

It should be obvious that two sizes of an image aren’t sufficient. Sure, we could start at 320 as 1x and then rewrite our markup to look something like this:

<img srcset="cat.jpg, cat-2X.jpg 2x, cat-3x.jpg 3x, […], cat-16x.jpg 16x">
Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

That will get us from 320px to the 5144px of the largest image, but it seems insane to me.

And this highlights another reason why I find the display density descriptors to be less desirable than other solutions. I don’t have any interest in keeping track of all of the different display densities available.

Do we want to provide 1x, 1.5x, 2x, 3x variants? What about accounting for things like the iPhone 6 Plus’s downsampling?

Not to mention what happens when you start working with flexible images. Now you have multiple densities at multiple image breakpoints. And sometimes you’re repeating your image sources because 2x at a small size could be the same as 1x resolution at a larger image breakpoint.

It gets messy quickly.

The moment you move beyond providing alternate densities of a fixed width img element, the display density descriptor becomes unwieldy and inadequate to the task.

What do you need instead? Part 4: Srcset Width Descriptors.

  1. Definitions
  2. Img Required
  3. Currently Viewing:Srcset Display Density
  4. Srcset Width Descriptors
  5. Sizes
  6. Picture Element
  7. Type
  8. CSS Responsive Images
  9. Image breakpoints
  10. Conclusion

  1. Unless we’re providing different image formats which we will cover later.

Comments

Oliver Ng said:

Nice article. Could you update your example to omit the @ symbol from the file names? These are illegal in many cases, and will result in broken images or builds. It’s a commonly used naming convention which ends up with unintended consequences.

Replies to Oliver Ng

Jason Grigsby (Article Author ) replied:

Thanks for the comment Oliver. I have NO PROBLEM removing the @ symbol from the file names.

To be honest, I always hated the way it looked, but I know that is an iOS convention and saw several other people using it in their examples so I thought it using it might make it more familiar to others.

But it doesn’t take much to convince me to remove it. I never liked them in the first place. All of the examples have been updated.

For those reading this after the fact, the filenames originally looked like ‘cat@2X.jpg‘, but per Oliver’s suggestion, I replaced the @ symbol with hyphens (e.g., ‘cat-2X.jpg‘).