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I can see where they are coming from, but I think they're missing the point of RWD completely. Responsive Web Design is more than ensuring your site looks good

I can see where they are coming from, but I think they're missing the point of RWD completely. Responsive Web Design is more than ensuring your site looks good on a mobile screen, a truly responsive site will not only scale down but also scale up for larger screens as well. They mention using a 980px grid, The Semantic Grid System (http://semantic.gs http://semantic.gs) sounds like a perfect candidate for this. You set your column width and gutters and it handles the rest for you, set the container width to 100% for fluid and BAM! you've got a responsive site that only needs minimal work. The difficulty of responsive web design is way over-exaggerated. A decent web developer shouldn't take any longer than an extra day (if that, just a few hours) to make a grid based responsive site. I feel as though it's embedded in my developer workflow so much so I don't think it makes things more complicated having a responsive aspect. It's never taken me double the time even when I first started building responsive sites, another exaggeration. All you need to do is divide the width of an element by it's parent container and multiply it by 100, the same can be applied for left and right padding and margin values as well. Another thing about RWD is if you're doing it for the sake of a good mobile experience you've already failed. Shrinking a site down doesn't reduce the overall page weight. An iPhone will still load stylesheets, Javascript files and other unneeded bloat you're hiding with a display:none; so the experience can sometimes be extremely cumbersome for a mobile user as opposed to building a separate mobile site. Having said that, making an already relatively light page respond to a smaller screen is acceptable. PS. Don't forget to set max-width:100% and height:auto on your images as well!

pmichaud 14y ago
I think you may be missing some of the difficulty in RWD. The hard part, as you said, isn't implementing a few media queries and resizing stuff. That is easy, you're right. The hard part is the design. If you need to shrink an element down 50%, is it still readable? Crisp? Does your logo do well under that kind of pressure or does it become a blob of color? If you blow it up and make it 100% on a large screen, how are you handling the columns of text? Because of course you're not just letting text lines expand indefinitely, right? Because that would be a readability disaster. Those are just a couple examples of where an overzealous programmer can get the design totally wrong by implementing the "easy fix." RWD is still pretty hard to get really right.

pmichaud 14y ago

I think you may be missing some of the difficulty in RWD. The hard part, as you said, isn't implementing a few media queries and resizing stuff. That is easy, you're right. The hard part is the design. If you need to shrink an element down 50%, is it still readable? Crisp? Does your logo do well under that kind of pressure or does it become a blob of color? If you blow it up and make it 100% on a large screen, how are you handling the columns of text? Because of course you're not just letting text lines expand indefinitely, right? Because that would be a readability disaster. Those are just a couple examples of where an overzealous programmer can get the design totally wrong by implementing the "easy fix." RWD is still pretty hard to get really right.