Articles Tagged images

Say you have an image you're using in an <img /> that is 800x600 pixels. Will it actually display as 800px wide on your site? It's very likely that it will not. We tend to put images into flexible container elements, and the image inside is set to width: 100%;. So perhaps that image ends up as 721px wide, or 381px wide, or whatever. What doesn't change is that image's aspect ratio, lest you squish it awkwardly (ignoring the … Read article

IntersectionObserver has made lazy loading a lot easier and more efficient than it used to be, but to do it really right you still gotta remove the src and such, which is cumbersome. It's definitely not as easy as:

<img src="celebration.jpg" loading="lazy" alt="..." />

The first time I made an image responsive, it was as simple as coding these four lines:

img {
  max-width: 100%;
  height auto; /* default */
}

Though that worked for me as a developer, it wasn’t the best for the audience. What happens if the the image in the src attribute is heavy? On high-end developer devices (like mine with 16GB RAM), few or no performance problems occur. But on low-end devices? It’s another story.… Read article

Web developers and content editors alike often forget or ignore one of the most important parts of making a website accessible and SEO performant: image alt​ text. You know, that seemingly small image attribute that describes an image:

​​​<img src="/cute/sloth/image.jpg" alt="A brown baby sloth staring straight into the camera with a tongue sticking out." >

If you regularly publish content on the web, then you know it can be tedious trying to come up with descriptive … Read article

With CSS filter effects and blend modes, we can now leverage various techniques for styling images directly in the browser. However, creating aesthetic theming isn't all that filter effects are good for. You can use filters to indicate hover state, hide passwords, and now—for web performance.

While playing with profiling performance wins of using blend modes for duotone image effects (I'll write up an article on this soon), I discovered something even more exciting. A major image optimization win! … Read article

Most WordPress themes show user Gravatars in the comment threads. It's a way of showing an image with the user, as associated by the email address used. It's a nice touch, and almost an expected design pattern these days.

Every one of those gravatars is an individual HTTP request though, like any other image. A comment thread with 50 comments means 50 HTTP requests, and they aren't always particularly tiny files. Yeesh.

Let's lazy load them.… Read article