[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #21389: Retina theme custom headers

[WordPress Trac]

#21389: Retina theme custom headers
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 Reporter:  nacin            |       Owner:  Otto42
     Type:  feature request  |      Status:  assigned
 Priority:  normal           |   Milestone:  Future Release
Component:  Customize        |     Version:
 Severity:  normal           |  Resolution:
 Keywords:                   |     Focuses:
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Comment (by Otto42):

 Unfortunately, the browser support still isn't quite there.

 The picture tag and the srcset element offer the way forward here, because
 with these, having to use JS to select the displayed image is not
 necessary, you can specify all of them and have the browser choose, even
 dynamically.

 Currently, only Chrome really offers this full support:
 http://caniuse.com/picture

 Doing this in a plugin is possible, but would need the theme to support it
 as well, because of the current usage of `get_header_image()`. New
 functions (like `get_header_image_tag()`) would provide themes the means
 to have core output the new image tags (and/or CSS) needed to provide the
 responsive header image. The theme shouldn't have to know how it works to
 make it happen, it should just-work.

 Still, this is a decent candidate for one of the next few releases.

 Note that while making "fixed-size" header images responsive is relatively
 easy, flexible width images still needs a bit of thinking. It might be
 reasonable simply to provide a variety of various image sizes at some
 breakpoints, then let the browser choose amongst them for the full set of
 the available images. If this is done, then the difference between "fixed"
 and "flexible" kind of disappears, since you could do this for any image.
 However, themes may desire to set those breakpoints themselves. An
 analysis of various existing theme methods for showing header images may
 be in order to find out the right way.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/21389#comment:16>
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