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IMO the best solution is to just have natural breakpoints (i.e. when a part of the design of the given page would cease to work, add a breakpoint to change the

IMO the best solution is to just have natural breakpoints (i.e. when a part of the design of the given page would cease to work, add a breakpoint to change the format of that component, rather than at predefined points) and then for logged in users have an option to request the desktop design, which you can do by simply setting a viewport to 1000px width and leaving everything else unchanged what would be really nice would be element-size-based media queries. you can use javascript to do it but that sucks

ryandrake 6y ago
I think we really need to be able to more cleanly separate content from the design, and let the browsers, a.k.a. user-agents, decide/override more. Browsers have ceded too much control over layout and visual structure to web designers, who go on to make (often incorrect) assumptions about how the user wants to interact with their content.
- asddubs 6y ago
  the problem is that there is no distinction between a webapp and a document, the line is thoroughly blurred. For documents, you can probably just override a fair bit of schenanigans and things will still work, if look somewhat ugly, but for a spreadsheet app that's a rube goldberg machine of javascript and continuously regenerated html and css, it'll just turn it into a broken mess. the browser has become the de facto cross compatible application platform, which requires handing a lot of control to websites.
tshaddox 6y ago
That sounds similar to a CSS proposal called container queries, which has been a much-requested feature for many years. Currently the only native way to do responsive design is to make styling changes based on attributes of the viewport (like width). But like you say, it would be nice to have dynamic layouts for every individual component of a website. Container queries do that.
- asddubs 6y ago
  yeah I heard of those, I was blanking on the name, thanks for pointing that out. Another thing I really want would be position:device-fixed; but that one doesn't even seem to really be on the table for the most part.

ryandrake 6y ago

I think we really need to be able to more cleanly separate content from the design, and let the browsers, a.k.a. user-agents, decide/override more. Browsers have ceded too much control over layout and visual structure to web designers, who go on to make (often incorrect) assumptions about how the user wants to interact with their content.

asddubs 6y ago
the problem is that there is no distinction between a webapp and a document, the line is thoroughly blurred. For documents, you can probably just override a fair bit of schenanigans and things will still work, if look somewhat ugly, but for a spreadsheet app that's a rube goldberg machine of javascript and continuously regenerated html and css, it'll just turn it into a broken mess. the browser has become the de facto cross compatible application platform, which requires handing a lot of control to websites.

tshaddox 6y ago

That sounds similar to a CSS proposal called container queries, which has been a much-requested feature for many years. Currently the only native way to do responsive design is to make styling changes based on attributes of the viewport (like width). But like you say, it would be nice to have dynamic layouts for every individual component of a website. Container queries do that.

asddubs 6y ago
yeah I heard of those, I was blanking on the name, thanks for pointing that out. Another thing I really want would be position:device-fixed; but that one doesn't even seem to really be on the table for the most part.