Responsive web design is the latest trend sweeping the web design world. It combines flexible grids with flexible images and media queries. The result you get is a layout that responds to the resolution of your screen or mobile device and re-adjusts the view to work with that resolution without affecting the HTML.
This idea is great and there are lots of examples on the web which show of the power of this concept, but it does raises some questions. Is serving the same html to desktop as a mobile device a good idea? Is this workable in a real world where clients don’t really understand all the implications? Is this just a fad?
The way responsive web design currently works is that by changing screen size different parts of a style sheet get triggered and in turn change the visual representation of the page. This is very attractive way to quickly convince people that it is now easy to create mobile versions of the site. This does work for sites that are mainly content sites such as blogs. Most if not all of the html is still used on the smaller resolution, it is just re-arranged to fit the available view area. Things get more complicated if this method starts to hide whole blocks of HTML from the client’s view and doesn’t display it anywhere on smaller resolutions. This is a problem because this HTML is still served to the device.
Another problem is that none of the mobile specific features are being used when employing this version of responsive web design. The context in which the mobile web user views the website is ignored. Do I really need the same content on a phone as desktop or maybe a mobile optimized version of the site is a better way to go. These are very important questions to keep in mind when deciding to go with responsive web design.
I’m not sure about other developers but where I work I can’t imagine convincing majority of our clients that this is a good way to go. Most are well established business with huge web presence. It would be a monumental task to have them switch to this new pattern. For new projects this could be an easier sale as you can mention the fact that a separate mobile project may not be necessary. Again as with all things in web development it is project by project call.
Overall what I have seen so far this new pattern is a good start. It will not work for everything, but it does work for some things. It is going to be harder and harder for designers and developers to adapt to constantly changing world with more and more devices with different screen sizes. This relatively simple concept is a great start in a right direction. It has a similar feeling as back in the day when table based layouts were starting to be replaced by pure CSS solutions. It was an exciting time to be a developer back then and this has a potential to reenergize the industry again.
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