web

Yesterday I tweeted this: 

My excitement for Responsive Web Design is fading a bit. It’s great for simple websites, but not enough for more complex web apps.

On mobile you don’t just wanna shrink and hide some stuff.. you wanna change behaviour.

It caused some discussion and confusion. What I meant was that next to using media-queries to adapt to different screen sizes, we should also consider other aspects that improve the User Experience. Like changing behaviour trough JavaScript, optimize for a different input method like touch and be responsible with the often lower bandwidth. @fofr came up with a great hack to link Media Queries and JavaScript.

I think the problem is that in @beep’s original post, it mostly was described as a media-query, flexible-layout thing: “Fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries are the three technical ingredients for responsive web design”. But @danielmall notes that it’s an approach and not a technology and @vasilis sees responsive design as using client side techniques to optimize the experience.

So if you’re also one of those less educated people like me: The term ”Responsive Web Design“ has either evolved in its meaning, or we didn’t understand it from the beginning.