Check out any major web design or web development blog these days, and there are bound to be articles discussing how responsive design is evil and everyone has to build dedicated web apps. Or perhaps you’ve found the trove of sites that preach the joys of responsive and adaptive design, but spew hate about the waste of time that are web apps. What’s the deal with all the hatred and grandstanding. Let’s take a look.
WHAT IS RESPONSIVE DESIGN
Responsive Design could be seen as design that responds to the user. So a website (much like this one!) will look slightly different in a monitor as opposed to a tablet or mobile device, while still possessing the same base HTML code and structure. The key difference is the use of percentage based widths and removing the sidebar as the screen width gets smaller.
ETHAN MARCOTTE of A List Apart wrote an excellent article last year that showed both the excellence in using responsive design, and also it’s downfalls, chiefly the image issue and the lack of compatibility with IE 6-8. But Ethan also resolves most of these issues through a clever series of jQuery uses, image hacks, and IE hacks.
WHY RESPONSIVE DESIGN IS HATED
Many feel that responsive design should never be used. Both because of the problems presented in the article by Ethan Marcotte and other various reasons. Several excellent points have been brought up by several people, including Juan Pablo Sarmiento over atWeb Design Shock. One of the main issues I personally have is that when using CSS to create responsive design, you may need to use display:none in order to block out certain content. The problem with this is that the browser still loads the resource, using CPU resources, but it isn’t displayed. What a waste!
CONCLUSION
Many people love the thought of responsive design. It gives flexibility for multiple screen sizes, while not forcing the developer to build an outright web or dedicated app. It also gives your site that extra professional touch that clients and users love! There are also equal numbers of people who have major issues with responsive design and the concepts contained therein.
What about you? Do you use responsive design? Does responsive design drive you crazy? Let us know in the comments below!
Many thanks for taking the time to explain the terminlogy towards the beginners!