Book Image

RESS Essentials

Book Image

RESS Essentials

Overview of this book

RESS is a new methodology in the world of web design and development. It attempts to solve the problems that accompany the RWD (responsive web design) approach to web design. RESS is still in its infancy, but it is growing at an exponential rate. RESS Essentials shows you how to make server-side applications smarter and more aware of a visitor's environment limitations (device, screen size, and browser). This allows you to create faster and more reliable websites. Through this book, you will build a solid base of knowledge on RESS-related technologies, while the step-by-step tutorials will help you to create your own RESS system. This book is an introduction to RESS alchemy and gives you an incentive to build your own RESS lab. It will give you a broad overview of the multiple techniques used to code responsive websites in responsible ways. Beginning with an overview of RWD, you will learn the steps involved in setting up RWD for client-side development. You will then learn how to scale images using client- and server-side technology. By the end of this book, you will have learned about the implementation of RESS application patterns, browser feature detection, and various RESS architectures. RESS Essentials will also teach you how to use jQuery with some RWD design patterns and how to employ REST API for RWD pages.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
RESS Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Optimizing images


Optimizing the use of images on a web page has the following five flavors:

  • Optimizing image dimensions

  • Optimizing image compression

  • Optimizing the file format

  • Avoiding the use of images

  • Reducing the number of images

Optimizing image dimensions

Bitmaps have always defined dimensions in pixels. It is best when those dimensions match the exact area occupied by the image on the screen—without resizing with HTML or CSS. Scaling down images is possible only in the fixed layout of an HTML page. In responsive pages, fluid image scaling with CSS is a routine. We can only approximately adjust the actual image dimensions to its displayed size. We talked in detail about existing solutions in Chapter 5, Responsive Images Client- and Server-Side Approaches. The module responsive_images we created in that chapter allows adding image versions manually adjusted to each resolution. It has the following two advantages over purely automated generation (like the one used in the script from www.adaptive...