Back in the day reserving space on a page for an image was easy, just add the width and height attributes! Then along came responsive designs, and that all kinda went out the window, because you see the browser didn’t know how to reserve space for an image with max-width: 100%; height: auto;. That meant the janky reflow of the image loading was back, without a simple generic solution to solve it.

That never sat right with me, so for today’s posts I’m going to explore the possibility of a generic solution, and what browser vendors are planning to do to make this easier.

In JavaScript ES modules we can’t rely on CommonJS-style module resolution to add extensions to our import statements. Even Node.js has recently dropped automatic extension resolution in an effort to be more compatible with the ESM specification. Bare imports for Node modules is still possible, but as a side-effect dual-modules are no longer possible, except via deep-imports (import foo from 'bar/module.mjs';).

Obviously nobody wants to write these out manually, but this presents some new challenges for transpilers, which unfortunately no transpilers have yet tried to solve.

So what can we do about this?