There are two different kinds of JPEG images: progressive JPEGs and non-progressive JPEGs. These categories have nothing to do with the JPEGs’ political beliefs. They’re all about the order in which they’ve been encoded.
Note: this article was originally published in Smashing Magazine.
Four years ago, Jason Grigsby asked a surprisingly difficult question: How do you pick responsive images breakpoints? A year later, he had an answer: ideally, we’d set responsive image performance budgets to achieve “sensible jumps in file size”. Cloudinary built a tool that implemented this idea, and the response from the community was universal: “Great! Now – what else can it do?” Today, we have an answer: art direction!
In economics, there is a concept referred to as “The Laffer Curve,” which illustrates how increases in government tax rates beyond a certain level will ultimately decrease tax revenue. It is often visualized with the following graph:
Video is an increasingly important component for websites and apps, as consumer demand for and consumption of video content is growing. It’s not only for wired devices, though. More and more, consumers are accessing video where they want it, when they want it, on whatever device that happens to be nearby.
In the conclusion of this three-part interview the Jason Grigsby, we examine what the future may hold for images on the web. Previously: Part 1, Part 2.
EP: I want to go back to the idea that we started with, that images are fundamentally complicated; that they’ll always present us with problems. What do you think we are going to be working on and talking about in five-to-10 years with regard to images?
Back in the day, responsive website design wasn't the business imperative that it is now. In fact, just having a functioning website was all that it took to set you apart, and if it had images that loaded correctly within a few minutes, then that was a nice bonus. Needless to say, but I'll say it anyway, those days are long gone.
Here, in Part 1 (of a three-part series), we discuss how the industry slowly came to understand the surprisingly hard problems around “flexible media,” what’s been done to solve them, and the pain points and open questions that remain.
Websites have evolved greatly over the past few years. Once text-heavy websites have become more eye-catching with prominent images and video. But the addition of richer media isn’t the only change impacting websites. Consumer behavior also factors into this evolution, as web access has moved from the desktop realm to a variety of different devices – smartphones, tablets, laptops, smartwatches and TVs – with different dimensions and resolutions. And consumers want to be able to access web content anytime and from any location.
To ensure that website performance is optimized, bandwidth usage is minimized and users have a top-notch experience, we will need to address many challenges.
High resolution images and videos
If a picture is worth 1,000 words, it’s no surprise that website owners are using images and videos as powerful tools on their websites to engage visitors. High-resolution images look best, but these files are so big that they cause websites to load slowly and use excessive bandwidth. These problems frustrate visitors, and potentially decrease their incentive to engage further on the website.
This is a guest post by Nicolas Hoizey, co-founder of Clever Age and creator of the Jekyll Cloudinary plugin. Nicolas’ plugin leverages Cloudinary’s image storage, optimization, resizing, and delivery infrastructures to automate responsive images in Jekyll-generated static sites. We think it’s the bee’s knees, and invited Nicolas to write a bit about the process and motivation behind it. Without further ado, here’s Nicolas.