By handling failure nicely, your component seems to be better than any others I’ve heard of. (Thanks for doing that.) It’s even improving over browsers’ handling of it (right click, reload image) in situations where the intrinsic width and height of the image are not specified or overridden in CSS, which causes the <img> to collapse to generally the alt text height. (Responsiveness is often obtained with images via { max-width: 100%; height: auto }, but browsers don’t use the intrinsic width and height of the image to calculate the auto height. Hmm, I think this could be considered a bug; I might try my luck filing it against Gecko.)
But still, as a user I would consistently prefer a plain <img> to any fanciness.
But still, as a user I would consistently prefer a plain <img> to any fanciness.