

Ask HN: Why is a website being "responsive" good? - mcartyem

Why must website elements resize magically when windows are enlarged?<p>People read best when they don't move their head left and right. This means 80 characters in a line. Why must CSS frameworks have support for being "responsive"?<p>Why is responsive good?
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jdietrich
You've misunderstood what "responsive" means.

Text growing to fill the width of the page is the _default mode_ of the web.
The ability to control the width of text came much later. What has only
recently become practical - and what people mean by "responsive" or "fluid"
layout - is the ability to intelligently reformat the page to suit the
available container, by for instance using a layout that can grow from a
single column to five or six columns depending on the container width, or by
removing or simplifying certain navigation elements in very small containers.

Designing around a fixed layout is a very bad idea. Viewers with smaller than
anticipated containers will have to scroll horizontally and users of wider
than anticipated containers will be frustrated by large areas of whitespace.
Your layout is liable to break completely if a user is substantially altering
your page layout, for reasons of accessibility or convenience.

Responsiveness is about designing sites that are maximally readable and usable
on all devices; When done well, sites will effortlessly adapt to new devices
and new form-factors.

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Xrpde
Having two separate websites is bad for user experience no matter how you look
at it. I approach it to having a flash website and an html one. Same concept.
Plus mobile detection is not future proof.

~~~
EnderMB
Why? If a user interacts with a site differently on mobile than on their
desktop machine then two separate interfaces is good? That's not just good
"UX", it's good logic.

The main argument I see against separate "views" is that it's an expensive
exercise to effectively build two frontends for a single site. However, as
someone who has built both large-scale responsive and mobile-specific sites
neither is really cheaper.

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arkitaip
The real reason? Because making sure that your web site has a browser AND
mobile AND app version is too expensive. So most sites settle for a crappy
responsive version that pisses everyone off to some degree.

~~~
mcartyem
Why does your web site need to have all those versions?

Why can't you have only one version, and someone on mobile will zoom in and
out?

A web site version with 10 things on the header is going to piss people off on
the mobile app regardless of how responsively those 10 things show up in their
face. A better thing to do is to not show any of those crappy 10 things to
begin with.

~~~
thekevan
>Why can't you have only one version, and someone on mobile will zoom in and
out?

Because to do that manually is usually clunky. Responsiveness makes it happen
automatically and thus smooth.

>A web site version with 10 things on the header is going to piss people off
on the mobile app regardless of how responsively those 10 things show up in
their face.

Good responsive sites rearrange those 10 things in the header so that they are
not "in your face" as you say. See also: Twitter Bootstrap.

~~~
mcartyem
What does this rearrangement do that makes them not be in my face?

Twitter Bootstrap has been a disaster for me:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4651506>

