November 18, 2012

November 2012 Meeting Report

Our November meeting was devoted to responsive design and its cousin, progressive enhancement.

The meeting was organized around a video of a talk given by designer Jeremy Keith of Clearleft. Jeremy emphasized that the idea of "a website" is much more than how a site looks in a browser. It is broader than just that visualization. Further, the idea of controlling exactly how a site appears in a browser is a fiction. We do not know what user agent the reader is actually using and what technology the user has available, such as javascript or broadband. (We noted that AOL still has 3 million subscribers to its dial-up service.)

On the other hand, HTML is built to be responsive. So mobile, as well as any other form of serving information first, starts with good HTML.

A couple of references from the video:
We will finish the video in December with a little more on progressive enhancement and then look at some examples of styling for responsiveness and progressive enhancement.

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