In the age of concurrently having devices with vastly different resolutions a document should provide image resources in several resolutions in parallel. Regarding DocBook and DocBook XSL this has been discussed on the "docbook"-mailing list in the second half of 2013 (thread "Simplifying image markup"), but to my knowledge never made it into an RFE. So I do that now.
Regarding DocBook XSL with HTML output in 2013 Jirka provided two referencds possibly to consider:
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/srcset/w3c-srcset/ (now part of the HTML specification) and
http://picture.responsiveimages.org/
Facing the dissemination of High Resolution displays this topic is of increasing importance in my opinion.
Moved to https://github.com/docbook/docbook/issues/49