People should just stop making web pages for mobile. So many times I have had to force the desktop version of a page to actually get what I'm there for.

I think the real dead end is making websites for both mobile and desktop. They are simply too different to ever have any real hope of producing something that translates well to both without hopelessly crippling one of them.

Mobile-only sites, sure. Desktop-only sites, why not. If you want both, do both instead of making a hideous web design Cronenberg pleading for the relief of death.

Back when mobile exploded I got a bee in my bonnet that I had to have an app for my website. I spent a couple thousand dollars to have a highly recommended mobile website designer do this for me. The result was HORRIBLE and I decided to just live with what I had. Turns out my native website on mobile looks GREAT, far better than on a computer screen. Go figure.

> hideous web design Cronenberg

Deep cut

I find that responsive design works well for simpler webpages. But for more complex pages or apps, yeah: it totally falls apart.

However... whenever I see an app or site that has two separate websites, I know I'm in for trouble: sometimes one version will miss some features, and I'll invariably have to request the desktop website. The worst of them was my previous health insurance provider, that only had one very important feature in the mobile version.

m.website.com or website.com/m

Yes, this is the kind of thing that also sucks in my experience.

Yeah I remember using my palm device or flip phone to browse these sites

The handset is a dead concept and yet here we are carrying them around it’s sad. I can’t remember the last time I put a phone to my face yet that is exactly what the form factor was made for. It’s all but guaranteed Apple cannibalizes the phone handset market for a new mobile platform.

I think this is already happening. People are realizing that not every site needs to work (or more often, become a horrible vertically-scrolling soup) on mobile. The only laggard is Google which is still stuck in 2009 and downranks mobile-unfriendly pages (even on desktop searches)

This site works fine on mobile

Mobile design was something created for old phones that didn't have quite the resolution of computer monitors. Modern phones don't really need mobile designed sites.

Kinda doesn't though. Mobile most of all needs concessions for the much more limited input precision.

Personally I prefer pinch zoom for input precision instead of overly mobile design.

You need text to scale and reflow to device width if you want text to be readable. This is one of the main reasons for mobile web design. Else you're stuck panning around the screen to read the text zoomed in.

Once you decide to scale text to device size so that it's readable, you are stuck doing the rest of mobile web design (fluid layout).

You need to allow users to scale text as desired, as the original web intended. You shouldn't make a site targeted to mobile; you should make a site that allows the user to display in their client as they wish.

The problem will fix itself.

I don't understand what that means in practice except to evangelize the tenets of mobile (fluid) design.

How are you going to make a site that lets the user display the site as they wish without just making a reflowable mobile-friendly site?

Desktop sites are generally static and have nonfluid components like sidebars which is how fluid design became necessary in the mobile age which seems to be what you are proposing.

If by fine you mean I need to zoom and pan to read it then I guess it does, but I doubt anyone would call that "working well on mobile".

I would take

>need to zoom and pan to read

over every time I forbidden to pan and zoom by the site author.

Especially when I'm behind 43" 4k monitor and the site decide

WHAT TEN LINES

PER SCREEN

IS EVERYTHING

I WISHED FOR

It works way better for me on mobile than most new sites do.

Developers assume everyone has the latest iPhone or Pixel. So they take like a minute to load, heat my phone up, drop the battery by 10%, and have a 20% chance of OOM-ing my browser.

The Guardian is the absolute worst at this. I don't know why, it brings mobile Firefox to its knees.

Basically, fancy "mobile friendly" JS is no good if it makes my phone stutter and go catatonic.

Whereas if people just wrote old school "CSS Zen Garden" sites, or even this old table stuff, any ancient phone could handle them easily.

But no, I need to go pay a kid to dig up more coltan.

I can scroll. It's ok. What I can't do is will my phone faster, without shelling out more stupid cash.

The trick for mobile is to go even simpler: plain unstyled html is as responsive as it gets.