I am the developer of the WordPress plugin called WP Retina 2x. It works really well – worked a lot on it – but something bothers me.
The well-known trick to detect the Retina Displays on the server-side is to use a cookie based on the window.devicePixelRatio value. It works perfectly but I consider it to be a workaround. More annoying, you cannot know whether the display is retina or not BEFORE generating the HTML (on the first visit).
We have many HTTP headers available so why the browsers just don’t simply add a new one? We could have a Accept DevicePixelRatio (with such values as “2;1” or “1” by default – we could even have a “4” in the future just to contradict Steve Jobs :p) and we wouldn’t need a cookie anymore. The whole workflow would be much cleaner. I also believe the server should know the technical details about the client and let the user identity or preferences to the cookies.
I have no idea how to promote this idea at this point, but first would you tell me if this is a good idea? If yes, how could we have the browsers implementing it? (I guess it wouldn’t that easy but we need a starting point). Or maybe… would you have a different idea completely?
