This video builds on concepts explained in a previous video: https://egghead.io/lessons/html-5-optimized-cross-browser-images-with-webp-and-the-picture-element. If you're not already comfortable with the .webp
image format and the picture
HTML tag, please watch the earlier video first :)
"Next-gen" image formats like .webp are often 2-3x smaller than their .png
or .jpg
counterparts. Unfortunately, Safari and Internet Explorer have no .webp
support. The HTML picture
element lets us serve tiny modern images to most browsers, while gracefully falling back to png/jpg for Safari/IE.
In this video, we show how to create a React component that wraps up some of the funkiness of working with the picture
element. We'll create an ImgWithFallback
component which can be used anywhere you'd use an img
tag.