I think it’s a bit of a shame that Brett is canning his mobile-first device-detection library, but I totally understand (and agree with) his reasons.
There is a consensual hallucination in the market, that we can silo devices into set categories like mobile, tablet, and desktop, yet the reality is drawing these lines in the sand is not an easy task.
I really like these thoughts on the importance of design systems for the web. It’s not about providing a few perfect deliverables that won’t survive once they go live; it’s about designing for the unexpected, the unpredictable:
Design for every state, not the best state.
Those clever chaps at The Guardian are experimenting with some mobile-first responsive design. Here’s how it’s going so far.
Some more thoughts on how our workflow needs to adapt to the current ever-changing device landscape.
Trent offers some excellent advice for dealing with the effects of the iPad’s retina display on your websites. That advice is: don’t panic.
A great step-by-step tutorial from Brad on developing a responsive site with a Content First mindset.
Josh responds to Jakob Nielsen’s audaciously ignorant advice on siloing mobile devices. Josh is right.
Nielsen says his research is based on studies of hundreds of mobile experiences, and I don’t doubt it. But because he’s finding tons of poor mobile websites doesn’t mean we should punt on creating great, full-featured mobile experiences.
It’s great to see the Future Friendly call-to-arms being expanded on. Here it’s university sites that are being looked at through a future-friendly lens.
BBC News are using the mobile subdomain to plant the seed of responsive design. It’s a smart move that’s been really nicely executed.
Yet another great post from Brad:
Whenever I think of the concept of “One Web” and providing universal access to information on the web, I tend to break it down into something much simpler: give people what they ask for.
A sweet little meditation on the nature of the web and responsive design.
Luke outlines three different solutions to delivering a site to multiple devices.
A great article from Sara Wachter-Boettcher on crafting future-friendly content. The content prioritisation described here mirrors what I’ve been doing in workshops.
Here’s a great braindump from Paul following the Responsive Summit, detailing multiple ways of potentially tackling the issue of responsive images.
Josh goes through the talking points from the recent Responsive Summit he attended. Sounds like it was a great get-together.
A rallying cry for a content-focused—rather than device-focused—approach to responsive design. Despite the awful title and occasionally adversarial tone, this article is making a very good point about being future friendly.
A nice round-up of responsive and future-friendly resources.
Yes! Yes! Yes!!!
Progressive enhancement is the only sane approach to today’s massively divergent landscape of devices. It can’t be repeated often enough.
Stephanie focuses on Android but this is a cautionary tale about trying to impose control over what you’re sending to the multitude of mobile devices out there.
Designing to fixed screen sizes is in fact never a good idea…there is just too much variation, even amongst ‘popular’ devices.
Brad is on a roll. He knocks it out of the park again, this time talking about the difference between supporting the huge range of mobile browsers out there compared to trying to optimise for them.
Some future-friendly musings on mobile from Mozilla and Yahoo.
A great round-up of links and posts relating to the increasingly-important role of content strategy and structured content in our multi-device, responsively-designed online world.
Brent Simmons follows up on that Dave Winer post with some future-friendly thoughts:
If I had to choose one or the other — if I had some crazy power but I had to wipe out either native apps or web apps — I’d wipe out native apps. (While somehow excluding browsers, text editors, outliners, web servers, and all those apps we need to make web apps.)
That’s not the case, though. Nothing has to get wiped out.
I think instead that we’ll see a more tangled future. Native apps will use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript more. Web apps will appear more often on smart phones as launchable apps.
A great, great reminder from Brad on the importance of progressive enhancement especially on mobile. There seems to be a real mindset amongst developers working on mobile sites that JavaScript is a requirement for building anything (and there’s a corresponding frustration with the wildly-varying levels of JavaScript support). It ain’t necessarily so!
Luke points out that the web is everywhere: it’s accessible through the browser but also through many native applications. This is the real Web Operating System.
The Web (browser) is inside of every application instead of every application being inside the Web (browser).
Mark continues to hammer home the most important thing to keep in mind when creating responsive designs: design from the content out, not the canvas in.
A PDF of the slides (with copious notes) from Josh’s brilliant presentation. I love this guy!
This thread on whether HTML5 Boilerplate should include Respond.js by default (and whether the CSS should take a small-screen first approach) nicely summarises the current landscape for web devs: chaotic, confusing …and very, very exciting.
This vision thing commissioned by Microsoft shows a future-friendly networked world where content flows like water from screen to screen.
Josh nails it: publishers need to stop thinking in terms of issues:
Publishers and designers have to start thinking about content at a more atomic level, not in aggregated issues. That’s how we already understand news as consumers, and we have to start thinking that way as publishers, too. This is why Flipboard, Instapaper, and other aggregators are so interesting: they give you one container for the whole universe of content, unbound to any one publisher.
Given some recent hand-wringing about the web as a “platform,” it seems appropriate to revisit this superb article from Ben. The specifics of the companies and technologies may have changed in the past year but the fundamental point remains the same:
Everything about web architecture; HTTP, HTML, CSS, is designed to serve and render content, but most importantly the web is formed where all of that content is linked together. That is what makes it amazing, and that is what defines it. This purpose and killer application of the web is not even comparable to the application frameworks of any particular operating system.
Andy responds to Joe Hewitt’s recent despondent posts about the web. I tend to agree with Andy: I think comparing the web to other “platforms” is missing the point of what the web is.
See also: http://benward.me/blog/understand-the-web
A great collection of the future-friendly techniques of today: progressive enhancement, mobile first and responsive design.
An insight into Elliot’s current design process which highlights the advantages of designing in the browser when you take a content-first approach.
A terrific presentation on progressive enhancement and mobile web development from Brad at Web Design Day. You can look at the slides, read the notes and watch the video.
Looks like Lyza’s presentation at Over The Air at Bletchley Park was really excellent.
A great little interview with Lyza, wherein she outlines her future-friendly attitude to web development.
Jason takes a high-level look at tackling mobile-first responsive images (his next post will dig into the details). This is a really good summation of current thinking. Be sure to read the comments too: Andy chimes in with his experiences.
Bruce nails his colours to the mast of future-friendliness (and nicely summarises recent heated debates between John Allsopp, Alex Russell and Joe Hewitt).
Brad documents his time at Mobilewood and cast his gaze to a future-friendly horizon.
Josh sums up the Mobilewood experience wonderfully. He also makes it clear that futurefriend.ly is just the beginning:
This stuff is hard, and we need to do it together. This is a time to be generous, and it’s a time for conversation. Let’s get after it.
Luke beautifully encapsulates the forces that drove the creation of the futurefriend.ly site. I feel like I should be standing on my chair, declaring “Oh captain, my captain!”
In today’s incredibly exciting yet overwhelming world of connected digital devices, these are the truths we hold to be self-evident…
This is the plain vanilla look.
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