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:

• http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/ (Check this site in different browsers and note the slight differences, none of which matters to the actual content delivered.)
• A Dao of Web Design

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.

November 2012 Meeting Announcement -- CSS and Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design is probably the hottest topic now in the world of web development. It will only get hotter given the increasing number of different sized screens that people will be using to view your sites. Reed Gustow started us on this topic at our Web Design SIG, and this month, we will follow up with a video and some commentary on how to implement responsive design and why.

You will come away with a different vision of how to organize your next project.