I’m already a huge fan of Scott Jehl’s picturefill responsive images technique. It’s a simple javascript based polyfill that adds the proposed picture element to your site. I’ve used it repeatedly on my professional work and side projects.
But I noticed one important limitation of the base work; because it’s JS powered, there’s a brief moment where the pseudo picture element “pops into” the layout after the initial load. For some pages that effect is acceptable, but for my latest work, I needed more control on when the picturefill effect is activated.
That’s where this fork by developer Tyson Matanich was very helpful. It’s a simple but powerful idea: add an extra method to activate the picture element early before a full DOM load. However I found the rest of the extra options and functionality too much for what my project needed; instead I took the basic gist and forked my own copy of Jehl’s original for actual usage. Works great.