Thus the Web Begins Resolutionizing

© Apple

The problem began when the web goes mobile.

And as mobile screen resolution goes higher web workers have tried to find a good solution to handle designs on different screen resolutions in a smart way.

For the lack of a better term, someone coined the term ‘[Responsive Web Design](http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/)'.

Then there’s another problem: How to properly scale images for different resolution? The puzzle continues and the term stuck. ‘Responsive images’ became the topic in coffee shops and breakfast meets.

As Jason Grigsby [explains nicely](http://www.cloudfour.com/responsive-imgs/) there’s actually no good solution but several [pragmatic techniques](http://cloudfour.com/responsive-imgs-part-2/) to patch this world-wide gap.

But then the new iPad came out.

iPad’s gorgeous retina display is one giant beast. At 264ppi, its 2048 * 1536 screen resolution is hungry for pixels. Wait, isn’t that the density of full-size images? No, not exactly, but close.

While photographer Duncan Davidson was attempting to future-proof his websites, [he came across an interesting problem](http://duncandavidson.com/blog/2012/03/webkit_retina_bug):

> Relatively small high-resolution images — such as John Gruber’s Daring Fireball logo — work great. But 2000-pixel wide photographs failed miserably and ended up looking worse than the 1000-pixel wide images they were replacing in my test pages. Much worse, in fact.

> […]

> Bottom line, however, is that there’s a limit to serving up web images in JPG format with WebKit the new iPad and the limit kicks in when you approach screen-filling resolutions.

His post is a good home base for your research in this topic, which includes the two links above on responsive imgs. Interestingly, there’s [another article by Jason Grigsby](http://cloudfour.com/how-apple-com-will-serve-retina-images-to-new-ipads/) detailing how Apple solves their problem. I also found [an active discussion](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3812804?start=0&tstart=0) on Apple Support Communities that discusses image size and how it relates to the web on retina displays.

Now that I’ve done some reading, I got some homework to do.