These days, one of the big buzzwords is “responsive design”. But what, exactly, is a “responsive” design? What is it responding to? Theoretically, it means building a site that provides an optimal experience regardless of the device it is being viewed on. Here’s why that notion is stupid.
First off, you have no idea what device a visitor is viewing your site on. If you think you do, you are seriously deluded at best. How do you find out what device they have? Maybe you sniff the user agent string on the server side and send a page designed for that type of device. But how do you know that the user agent strng isn’t lying to you? Even if yu can trust it, how do you handle the case where the viewer has his web browser at a tenth of the screen size? Or maximized on a ridiculously large screen? Or maybe he is viewing his ridiculously large screen from across the street? The user agent string tells you none of this.
Now some dim bulb out there is probably thinking that this sounds like a brilliant application for javascript. Or, worse, jquery. Are you insane? That is just asking for trouble. Sure. Javascript allows you to query the window size and charge around adjusting your content to fit on the screen in some useful manner. It even allows you to handle the case where the window is resized! But what if the viewer has javascript disabled or doesn’t support it? How is it going to play with a screen reader for a blind visitor? Or a brail readout?
Wait, what? Who said anything about blind people? Think about it. The device showing the site may not be a bitmapped display. After all, what good is a bitmapped graphics display to a blind person? If you’re going to be responsive, why not be responsive to that, too? Okay, I’ll grant you that your content may not be relevant to blind people. It may also be that blind people are such a small part of your audience that you don’t care. But to make a site truly responsive, I contend that you must at least consider them.
Of course, we can also make use of new fangled features of CSS and have the web site choose a layout based on the actual viewport size. We could, say, suppress useless columns on smaller displays or reduce the navigation sprawl. Perhaps you limit the width of a text column to something pleasant to read instead of having it sprawl from one side to the other. This would even work for people resizing browser windows. It doesn’t solve the massive screen from a city block away problem, but that is not your problem anyway. That user likely has a magnifier of some kind. This may be the best overall solution once the requisite new fangled features are supported across all the major browsers.
There’s another aspect of site design that is related to responsive design. How many sites have you encountered that used mouseovers to provide a critical access to the navigation with no other possible means of navigating? How does that navigation work on a touch screen interface where it is nearly impossible to actually do a hover? How many other user interface elements have you encountered that are difficult or less than ideal on something that is not substantially similar to a classic desktop computer?
It’s pretty clear that I agree with a “responsive” site that is implemented sensibly (which most are not), so why do I think the notion of “responsive design” is stupid? The whole notion is stupid because it should never have been required in the first place! Every site should be responsive. If we had not gone off the deep end with fancy gewgaws, widgets, gizmos, and buzzwords, every web site would already have been “responsive”. This will date me, but I remember the early days of the web when graphical web browsers were the new thing. I remember using Netscape 0.8. I remember when Lynx was the best option in many circumstances. Back then, we didn’t have these fancy-ass sites that we have now. But they worked! They were “responsive”! Nobody needed a buzzword to make something responsive back then. It just was. In short, the notion of “responsive design” should not be a novel thing. It should just be the thing. Design should just be responsive by default.