A different way of looking at responsive design: Intention.js

Re:A different way of looking at responsive design: Intentio... by antsar on Tuesday August 27, 2013 @02:07PM (#6285100)

Why can't this adaptation happen on the server? Client tells server what the resolution possibilities are ("the current browser size is X by Y, and my screen size (and thus maximum browser size) is W by Z), and server gives back only styles relevant to that size. On mobile devices where the browser is always fullscreen, that means a maximum of two layouts (horizontal, vertical).

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Re:A different way of looking at responsive design: Intentio... by cheald on Tuesday August 27, 2013 @02:13PM (#6285131)

Because clients don't send this information to the server (and if they did, its validity would be suspect), and because browser layout engines and CSS are already designed to be independent of specific device metrics. It's a solution to a problem that doesn't need solving.

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Re:A different way of looking at responsive design: Intentio... by benatkin on Tuesday August 27, 2013 @02:23PM (#6285202)

It sends the User-Agent, which can be used to determine whether it's the desktop or not. It doesn't solve the portrait and landscape changing problem. So some client-side responsive design would still need to be used.

I think a hybrid approach would be too tedious for someone developing a website to do, in order to get the payoff of sending less to mobile browsers, but it may be worth implementing in a framework.

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Re:A different way of looking at responsive design: Intentio... by cheald on Tuesday August 27, 2013 @02:31PM (#6285247)

1) User agents lie. Frequently.

2) A user agent doesn't encode any information about the actual metrics of the device.

Doing layout by user agent is basically a worst-case hellhole of browser-specific codebase fragmentation. There's a very good reason why best practices have been trending away from "test for vendor class" and towards "test for agent capabilities".

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Re:A different way of looking at responsive design: Intentio... by benatkin on Tuesday August 27, 2013 @08:07PM (#6287194)

Well a sufficiently complex framework could deal with it, by making another trip to the server if it discovers the code being sent down the first time isn't good enough.

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Re:A different way of looking at responsive design: Intentio... by untog on Tuesday August 27, 2013 @02:49PM (#6285355)

It sends the User-Agent, which can be used to determine whether it's the desktop or not.

What is "desktop"? An MS Surface Pro would report as a desktop browser, but it's a touch interface. You can also resize the browser window- what then?

So some client-side responsive design would still need to be used.

Which is the point. The server can't know conclusively so why make it try?

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Re:A different way of looking at responsive design: Intentio... by martin-adams on Tuesday August 27, 2013 @02:38PM (#6285283)

The fact that I'm on a desktop does not take into account that my browser window may be smaller than my 'desktop screen'. Responsive is the way to go because it works.

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Re:A different way of looking at responsive design: Intentio... by nostrademons on Tuesday August 27, 2013 @03:12PM (#6285492)

CSS3 media queries can often fulfill the missing link for screen sizes, aspect ratios, etc.

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/

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Re:A different way of looking at responsive design: Intentio... by antsar on Tuesday August 27, 2013 @06:23PM (#6286672)

I didn't mean to imply that this is possible with technology we have at the moment. A piece of JavaScript code (framework, perhaps) could surely send the needed data, and for those with JS disabled, the page could fail over to using media queries (to be exact, it would need to load the media query version the first time your site is loaded, but could immediately redirect to the lighter JS version if you have JS enabled and the light/JS version would be loaded for future requests).

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Re:A different way of looking at responsive design: Intentio... by vicky6k6 on Wednesday August 28, 2013 @07:29PM (#6293318)

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Re:A different way of looking at responsive design: Intentio... by joshribakoff on Tuesday August 27, 2013 @02:33PM (#6285257)

Look at Github. They serve different markup to mobile devices. Responsive design is great, but for a fast mobile experience you need to do some processing server side. There's still a place for responsive design (ex. flipping phone's orientation causes design to respond). That doesn't have to entail including markup that never renders on that particular device.

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