Among all the ways of creating and managing responsive images, each has its pros and cons. Aside from the purely technical aspects, such as reliability or compatibility, an important factor is, ease of use and flexibility. We usually gain one of those at the expense of the other. The concept from adaptive-images.com with .htaccess redirecting images to script and automatic generation of other resolutions is easy to set up and requires no effort to maintain. The disadvantage here is the inability to adjust the images manually for small resolutions and fine tune their size. The <picture> tag polyfill provides great flexibility but requires a significant amount of work to maintain. Our RESS solution is an attempt to create a balanced approach. It creates automatically resized versions but allows for manual override.
In the next chapter, we will discuss optimizing the performance of responsive pages. You will learn about optimization purpose, methods, myths, and limits.