I recently blogged about how images are hard and it ended up being a big ol’ checklist of things that you could/should think about and implement when placing images on websites.
I think it’s encouraging to see frameworks — these beloved tools that we leverage to help us build websites — offering additional tools within them to help tackle this checklist and take on the hard (but perfectly suited for computers) tasks of displaying images.
Some examples:
I’m not sure I’d give any of them flying colors as far as ease of use. There is stuff to install, configure, and it’s likely you’ll only reach for it if you already know you should be doing it, and your pre-existing knowledge of image performance can help you through the process. It’s not the failing of these frameworks; this stuff is complicated and the audience is developers who are, fair is fair, a little into the idea of control.
I do gotta hand it to my BFF WordPress on this one. You literally do nothing and just get responsive images out of the box. If you need to tap into the filters to control things, you can do that like you can anything else in WordPress: through hooks. If you go for Jetpack (and I highly encourage you to), you flip on the (incredibly, free) Site Accelerator feature, which takes all those images, optimizes them, CDN-hosts them, lazy loads them, and serves them in formats, like WebP, when possible (I would assume more next-gen formats will happen eventually). Jetpack is a sponsor, so full disclosure there, but I use it very much on purpose because the experience makes image handling something I literally don’t have to think about.
Another interesting aspect of frameworks-helping-with-images is that some of it was born out of Google getting involved. Google calls it “Aurora”:
For almost two years, we have worked with some of the most popular frameworks such as Next.js, Nuxt and Angular, working to improve web performance.
The project does all sorts of stuff, including hand out money to help fund open-source tools, and direct help specific initiatives. Like images:
An Image component in Next.js that encapsulates best practices for image loading, followed by a collaboration with Nuxt on the same. Use of this component has resulted in significant improvements to paint times and layout shift (example: 57% reduction in Largest Contentful Paint and 100% reduction in Cumulative Layout Shift on nextjs.org/give).
Cool, right? I think so? What weirds me out about this just a smidge is that it feels meaningful when Google’s squad rolls up to contribute to a framework. They didn’t pick underdog frameworks here, surely on purpose, because they want their work to impact the most people. So, frameworks that are already successful benefit from A-squad contributions. A rich-get-richer situation. I’m not sure it’s a huge problem, but it’s just something I think about.
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