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The page adapts to the screen. It means making different versions for different types of screens. But, the development process is so abbreviated that it takes

The page adapts to the screen. It means making different versions for different types of screens. But, the development process is so abbreviated that it takes way less time to make a mobile & desktop version than it would take to make the equivalent responsive version. Also many (most?) serious sites already develop separately for different platforms. So far, in 5 years I've been working on this, I've not had a single comment from a non-developer about the responsiveness being inappropriate.

cunthorpe 5y ago
Kids can't explain their emotions. Non-developers can't tell what's wrong with websites. Just because they don't complain about something specifically, it doesn't mean that they don't feel discomfort.
derekzhouzhen 5y ago
There is more than mobile and desktop; there are tablets that is somewhere in between. Hell, the mobile users can rotate their phone. Those being said, it could be a viable solution for fixed screen kiosks.
erinaceousjones 5y ago
Can I chime in as a regular user, even though I'm a developer? I looked at the website on my big 1440p monitor. It looked cool. I resized the window to a still reasonable size (1280-ish width). Now some of the text is waay too small for me to read. 1366x768 is a still pretty common laptop resolution..! I can't zoom in the text like on a regular page, it just makes the whole thing bigger, like an image. I also can't use my favourite a11y tool waspline reader [1] because the HTML is hidden :-( but... I'm not a blind person who uses a screen reader. I'm an ADHD'er with visual snow. I can't change the fonts to ones which are a little more readable for me - and the font rendering in SVG images on Firefox on my linux computer isn't the best. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/waspline-reader/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/waspline-read... ^ tbh, considering a lot of stuff I read is in PDF form I am thinking about doing an equivalent of this that does OCR on the viewport and applies a shader so it works on anything, and it only really applies to long blocks of text, which aren't a feature of the kinds of things you're targeting (flyers, product landing pages etc) but I wanted to highlight some of the less obvious accessibility stuff that's around. I get it, pretty much everything posted to HN gets the "I don't like the design of this site for technical reasons" treatment (especially when it's an article on someone's blog and nobody was asking lol), but I do wanna highlight the not-so-obvious accessibility stuff. Lots of folk will get by without complaining, because they're kinda used to tech and design being a bit difficult, and they aren't aware how we can improve things for them! I've seen my mum pull out a magnifying glass to read stuff on tablets before - she finds it easier than trying to get pinch-to-zoom to work - "I hate the panning from left to right all the time. It's not like reading a book. I'll forget what the start of the bloody sentence was!". Some people will attribute it to just "not being good with technology", which makes me sad for the users. SVG is great but that "20 years of HTML and CSS" shouldn't be dismissed because it makes designs take longer. I think it's really exciting that we have such a powerful layout engine in web browsers these days; the best BEST site designs I've seen take the best of vector art and responsive design. It is SO satisfying having a good vector landing page where the text still reflows, different things are visible when you resize the window etc. I think your tool is great though, I just think you should run with all the "what about responsive design?" HN comments - you could have a really, really really good tool if you can support breakpoints, fluid layouts and reflowable text sections. The kind that people would pay $$$ for... Plus, it's gotten a lot better since flex layouts became a thing in CSS! I think Illustrator etc are missing a trick here too because they're designed more for print media, right?? What would be awesome is if there was a similar editor + format where responsiveness and fluidity were baked right into the authoring flow, like at the layer / object-group level, so you could say "those layers have to be pixel perfect, this one will show up at these sizes, this other one will stretch this amount, that one will scale relatively compared to that one" and hopefully end up with designs that you, the designer, are always satisfied with, which require little or no further work to adapt to other screen sizes, DPIs, devices, etc....
- AndrewSwift 5y ago
  I really appreciate your comment, and I just want to reassure you that we take accessibility seriously. In this case, we had to start somewhere, and we're excited to show it off. But it obviously needs work to be really accessible. Svija might never be appropriate for content-oriented websites, which may be most of them. It was quite difficult to create the WTF page in Illustrator — it's not made for that kind of thing. I am absolutely planning to build a tool, where, as you say "editor + format where responsiveness and fluidity were baked right into the authoring flow, like at the layer / object-group level". As soon as we can get some funding it's off to the races! Thanks again, you added an important point of view to the comments.

cunthorpe 5y ago

Kids can't explain their emotions. Non-developers can't tell what's wrong with websites. Just because they don't complain about something specifically, it doesn't mean that they don't feel discomfort.

derekzhouzhen 5y ago

There is more than mobile and desktop; there are tablets that is somewhere in between. Hell, the mobile users can rotate their phone. Those being said, it could be a viable solution for fixed screen kiosks.

erinaceousjones 5y ago

Can I chime in as a regular user, even though I'm a developer? I looked at the website on my big 1440p monitor. It looked cool. I resized the window to a still reasonable size (1280-ish width). Now some of the text is waay too small for me to read. 1366x768 is a still pretty common laptop resolution..! I can't zoom in the text like on a regular page, it just makes the whole thing bigger, like an image. I also can't use my favourite a11y tool waspline reader [1] because the HTML is hidden :-( but... I'm not a blind person who uses a screen reader. I'm an ADHD'er with visual snow. I can't change the fonts to ones which are a little more readable for me - and the font rendering in SVG images on Firefox on my linux computer isn't the best. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/waspline-reader/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/waspline-read... ^ tbh, considering a lot of stuff I read is in PDF form I am thinking about doing an equivalent of this that does OCR on the viewport and applies a shader so it works on anything, and it only really applies to long blocks of text, which aren't a feature of the kinds of things you're targeting (flyers, product landing pages etc) but I wanted to highlight some of the less obvious accessibility stuff that's around. I get it, pretty much everything posted to HN gets the "I don't like the design of this site for technical reasons" treatment (especially when it's an article on someone's blog and nobody was asking lol), but I do wanna highlight the not-so-obvious accessibility stuff. Lots of folk will get by without complaining, because they're kinda used to tech and design being a bit difficult, and they aren't aware how we can improve things for them! I've seen my mum pull out a magnifying glass to read stuff on tablets before - she finds it easier than trying to get pinch-to-zoom to work - "I hate the panning from left to right all the time. It's not like reading a book. I'll forget what the start of the bloody sentence was!". Some people will attribute it to just "not being good with technology", which makes me sad for the users. SVG is great but that "20 years of HTML and CSS" shouldn't be dismissed because it makes designs take longer. I think it's really exciting that we have such a powerful layout engine in web browsers these days; the best BEST site designs I've seen take the best of vector art and responsive design. It is SO satisfying having a good vector landing page where the text still reflows, different things are visible when you resize the window etc. I think your tool is great though, I just think you should run with all the "what about responsive design?" HN comments - you could have a really, really really good tool if you can support breakpoints, fluid layouts and reflowable text sections. The kind that people would pay $$$ for... Plus, it's gotten a lot better since flex layouts became a thing in CSS! I think Illustrator etc are missing a trick here too because they're designed more for print media, right?? What would be awesome is if there was a similar editor + format where responsiveness and fluidity were baked right into the authoring flow, like at the layer / object-group level, so you could say "those layers have to be pixel perfect, this one will show up at these sizes, this other one will stretch this amount, that one will scale relatively compared to that one" and hopefully end up with designs that you, the designer, are always satisfied with, which require little or no further work to adapt to other screen sizes, DPIs, devices, etc....

AndrewSwift 5y ago
I really appreciate your comment, and I just want to reassure you that we take accessibility seriously. In this case, we had to start somewhere, and we're excited to show it off. But it obviously needs work to be really accessible. Svija might never be appropriate for content-oriented websites, which may be most of them. It was quite difficult to create the WTF page in Illustrator — it's not made for that kind of thing. I am absolutely planning to build a tool, where, as you say "editor + format where responsiveness and fluidity were baked right into the authoring flow, like at the layer / object-group level". As soon as we can get some funding it's off to the races! Thanks again, you added an important point of view to the comments.