I'm a beginner at responsive design. I understand the mobile first argument which (at least from the client side) boils down to "Design for the phone first and then use CSS media queries to vary floats and widths as needed, and to use javascript to add non-essential images on the fly, for larger monitors."
However. Intricately planning individual layouts for all possible devices seems error prone to me. If not a fool's errand. New gizmos show up all the time. In my limited experience totally fluid layouts scale well or well enough between desktop and tablet. The literature frequently faults fluid layouts for looking bad when the user drags the browser out to too wide. But I don't see that as a problem. When I drag a fluid layout out to too wide I immediately pooch it back to narrower again, until it looks right. I think that's what everybody does. So now (if fluid layout covers both desktop and tablet) all you have to worry about is one media query for phone size gadgets. Removing all floats invariably makes a mess. A better first draft is to make every block element float left. Full width blocks still stack vertically. Narrower blocks sit side by side. A small amount of custom tuning from that point on is usually all it takes. Or at least so it seems. I am new at this. I'll skip over server-side device detection for now. Although that seems like the most powerful technology--if detail-oriented micro-managed layout really is the goal. Does anybody want to argue against that big picture view? Or amend it some, for the benefit of a beginner? -- /* Colin (Sandy) Pittendrigh >--oO0> */ ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [css-d@lists.css-discuss.org] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
