Re:There's never been a better time to build websites
by Mezzie on Monday December 20, 2021 @11:36AM
(#29626783)
Thanks for the correction/deep dive here. I was a kid + don't have an official education in cs, so I mix up terminology and what things were called sometimes.
I remember when media queries came out. It was so nice. Amazing. 10/10 for the time. You can do a lot with auto-margins and other ancient CSS, but there are definitely quite a lot of limits. (Sighs in someone who does a lot of email design and academic CMS design... let's party like it's 1999...)
> There is also some advantage to making separate designs carefully crafted for a variety of screen shapes, that you give up with fluid design techniques.
I agree strongly with this from a UX/UI point of view and as an educator.
Using media queries with breakpoints, and doing exactly what you describe, was the original “responsive design”. What you have in mind (I think) is what might be called “fluid design”—responsive design without media queries. You could always do this to some extent with such things as inline blocks, auto margins, and other ancient CSS technology (and an unstyled site also reflows responsively), but flex and grid allow more elaborate fluid designs.
There is also some advantage to making separate designs carefully crafted for a variety of screen shapes, that you give up with fluid design techniques.