ember-picturefill

A small Ember library to better integrate with Picturefill

Why?

Picturefill automatically runs when the page loads, looking for image tags that have the attributes that it polyfills. However, what happens if you soft-transition to a page, or have an image that is only shown under some circumstances? Chances are, Picturefill will be unable to find the image to polyfill the behavior correctly. This addon fixes the problem by providing a tiny wrapper around the img tag that triggers the Picturefill polyfill after the image enters the DOM, so that the polyfill is always applied.

What does it do?

• Provides a component that can be used in place of <img> that ensures that Picturefill knows when the element is made visible
• Provides a service that can be used to manually check the page for new <img> elements
• Provides an optional HTMLBars transformation that can change <img> tags into the wrapper component automatically, if the srcset or sizes attributes are present

Installation

Standard Ember addon stuff:

ember install ember-picturefill

Usage

Using the component

The semantics of the pf-img component are exactly the same as the <img> HTML tag. Any attributes set on the component will be set on the underlying <img> tag.

{{pf-img
    alt="Some cool image"
    src="examples/images/image-384.jpg"
    srcset="examples/images/image-384.jpg 1x, examples/images/image-768.jpg 2x"}}

Invoking the polyfill directly

If you need to invoke the picturefill function directly, you can use the refresh method on the picturefill service:

import Ember from 'ember';
 
const {
  Component,
  inject: { service } 
} = Ember;
 
export default Component.extend({
  picturefill: service(),
 
  actions: {
    onSomeAction() {
      this.get('picturefill').refresh();
    }
  }
});

However, do note that this is not required, since the polyfill will be invoked automatically after the component is inserted into the DOM.

HTMLBars transformations

<img> transformation

The <img> tag transformation turns <img> tags with a srcset property into a {{pf-img}} automatically. For example, this:

<img
    srcset="examples/images/image-384.jpg 1x, examples/images/image-768.jpg 2x" />

Turns into:

{{pf-img
    srcset="examples/images/image-384.jpg 1x, examples/images/image-768.jpg 2x"}}

Configuration

You can configure ember-picturefill in your ember-cli-build.js file like so. Values displayed are the defaults.

var EmberApp = require('ember-cli/lib/broccoli/ember-app');
 
module.exports = function(defaults) {
  var app = new EmberApp(defaults, {
    picturefill: {
      imgTagTransform: false, // Enable/disable the `<img>` -> `{{pf-img}}` transform
      plugins: []             // Picturefill plugins to include
    }
  });
 
  return app.toTree();
};

Plugins

Picturefill has a number of plugins that can be used with the library. If you want to include one of them, you can do so by adding the plugin name to the plugins array of the configuration. See the plugin directory for a list of names.

Good Stuff to Know

There are a few other nice things about this wrapper that I wanted to highlight:

• It pulls in the Picturefill library from NPM instead of Bower and automatically imports it into your app. The minified version is automatically used for production builds.
• The polyfill will only be run against the DOM at most one time per render cycle to cut down on unnecessary work

Compatibility Note

Officially, this addon supports Ember 2.4 and up. The {{pf-img}} component should work on things lower than that, but there were issues with the HTMLBars transform. If you need support below 2.4, try disabling the transform and you should be fine.