
The Responsive Designer - japhyr
http://simonfosterdesign.com/blog/web-design/the-responsive-designer/
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crazygringo
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who thinks "responsive" design is
completely overblown.

I think it's absolutely necessary to have different layouts for desktop and
mobile. But the idea that they need to "flow into each other", I just don't
buy. I mean, I've never seen anyone (in a real-life use case) resize their
browser window to be narrow on their desktop, and iPads deal quite well with
desktop-sized sites (especially navigating in horizontal mode).

The problem I have with fluidly "responsive design" is that it drastically
overcomplicates everything. Good design becomes a lot harder, because you
can't really keep in your head all the possible variations. A/B testing is
drastically overcomplicated, because maybe something works in large width,
doesn't work in 3/4 width, works again in 1/2 width, and doesn't work again in
1/4 width, because of the way elements pop around. And it just severly limits
the kind of layout you can do. And like I said previously, for what? People
don't really use "in-between" sizes, at least not that I've seen.

To me, "responsive design" just seems like a clever theoretical idea, without
any real-life benefits. When I make a mobile version of a site, it's usually
_drastically_ different from the desktop site -- because it's organized
vertically, because there's less that can be shown at once, because mobile
users often have a completely different set of use cases than desktop users.
It's a completely different beast.

In the vast majority of cases, I think it's impossible to shoehorn a truly
good desktop experience and a truly good mobile experience together into a
single "responsive design". I get that people are trying, but I'm just not
convinced by the efforts.

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DanBC
> I've never seen anyone (in a real-life use case) resize their browser window
> to be narrow on their desktop,

I do this very very often.

I will be watching a YouTube video or a BBC iPlayer video in one window. Then
I'll open another browser window and resize it to be tall and thin.

It is infuriating just how poorly most website cope with this tall thin
window. And really, most text is easier to read in a narrow column.

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jameswyse
Really good article! There's too many designers calling their work responsive
when they only work on desktop and a couple of Apple devices. It's much better
to design your CSS breakpoints around the content instead, so you can be sure
it looks good at _every_ size.

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mddw
At the begining, a responsive website was build around media queries.

Then it was media queries and a fluid grid.

Then it was media queries and a fluid grid and mobile first.

Now it's media queries and a fluid grid and mobile first and built around the
content.

Tomorrow what ?

Meanwhile, responsive websites are as crappy as non responsive one, but 2x
heavier because of the crazy CSS and all the async js.

If you can't detect the internet speed of your user, you can't make responsive
websites, period. That's why the only good responsive websites are the text-
content-only websites.

Come on, the linked post is nearly 2mb...

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jameswyse
Sure the generally accepted 'right way' is constantly evolving, but progress
is a always a good thing.

I'm not sure about your other points, I see no reason why a responsive site
should be 2x heaver in file size than its non-responsive equivalent, after all
it's only a few more bytes of CSS. The increase you're seeing is probably more
to do with large JS libraries and in the case of the linked article, many
large images.

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programminggeek
I'm in the middle of a huge responsive site redesign and I'll just say that
responsive is a lot of extra work up front, but having your site work
beautifully across platforms, devices, browsers is cool. The really painful
part is when you have many different layouts and per-page layouts. It's one
thing to make a blog design responsive, or twitter responsive when it's
basically the same layout. It's totally different to have tens of different
landing pages each with their own responsive styles. Very few if any sites are
doing that yet, so there aren't a ton of great examples or established
patterns.

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mnicole
Brilliant article. Loved the bits about 'trends' and 'experts', that's exactly
how I feel about placing emphasis on certain people and concepts on the web.
It's a slippery slope when everyone follows the same path.

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TheHippo
My favourite: "Apples are not the only fruit." This guy has never seens this
his site on an Android browser, otherwise he would noticed that his webfont
does not work on the default browser.

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pootch
All responsive design does is force you to spaghetti-fy your application to
the point it cant be maintained. A web app using responsive design will never
fit it on both android and iOS because it will not look like it belongs on
those platforms, so it will to the user look like crap. But oh you say I can
shoehorn iUI into the iphone version. Why would anyone bother with this when
it is EASY to target these platforms separately. IMO RD is not worth the time.
And that goes for phonegap and cross platform app kits. Total waste of time.

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billirvine
The length of the article was not responsive, however. Way too long for users
of small mobile screens.

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publicfig
I'm not sure what you mean by that. The length doesn't seem to cause a problem
with the design on mobile, at least on all the devices I have.

edit: Maybe you're trying to say that the length makes the article unfriendly
to mobile. In that case, it's worth pointing out that responsive design is not
synonymous with mobile design, but a separate process. While responsive design
may affect the mobile layout, responsiveness has very little to do with
factors such as article length.

~~~
billirvine
Being currently steeped in responsive design (not mobile-first, which really,
the opening link for this thread is a mobile-first approach, that happens to
be responsive), I concur. We have 6 small screens and 9 tablets we use for
testing... design is important, but design is a wrapper for content... some
better, some bad, some awesome.

The question being, as we consider stepping firmly into the scenario of an
unpredictably wide range of screen sizes and use-cases accessing the content
we create, should we also consider the amount of copy we impose on smaller
screens and/or mobile users with unknown time/bandwidth for content
consumption? I think responsible creators of digital content should consider
content-length as much as UI.

