Spot on. As I’ve said before, this is the important thing when building a site that normal people will use, instead of making a showcase so other designers can hopefully admire you and your work.
Also, as I’ve said before but feel it’s necessary to say once again, for exactly the same reasons:
As a consumer, I don’t care whether your site is “responsive”. I don’t go to your site to admire your design, I purely go there because of your content. I want a site optimised for speed. I want text that I can read without zooming, “pinching” or much scrolling. I want less text. I only want to get stuff done on your site and then move on to more important things in my life.
If the mobile user (or any other user, for that matter) zooms in, and another request is made for a higher-rez version, wouldn’t that same image, even higher-rez now, still be… zoomed in? A thing completely defeating the purpose of the request for higher-rez?
Unless the browser will only choose to zoom in on some objects and not zoom in on others. Deep deep waters, dear Mallory. Specifically taking the control from the user, when he explicitly asked for it.
And I know you love fuzzy blown-up images, but they make me physically sick. Which is why I will continue to stick with a browser who lets me enlarge text without zooming. I’ll probably never be able to use a phone that zooms everything unless it’s got a screen reader in it.
Nice and sharp: http://stommepoes.nl/zooom.png
too bad the layout is total shyte, but the image is NOT BLURRY and the headaches of my youth which were solved with glasses, until the point came where I was told within a few years glasses could not be manufactured to correct my vision… I had surgery but now, a little more than 10 years later, the eyes are starting to go bad again.
A blurry image in and of itself isn’t so much of an issue, but having it next to text where my eyes are moving around and reading it, while something blurry sits on the edge of my vision… that’s just nasty. Just as there are some folks who can’t have something dancing on the edge of their vision (like an animated ad banner next to content text).
Wait
Are you saying you’re some kind of…
evil Romanian Lex Luthor?
Wrong. Nothing’s changed at my end. I know that because I manage the site.
Partially right. There are two designs, one for mobile and one for desktop. The mobile landing page offers a “view the standard version” link. If you click that link, you’re on the desktop version of the site. You seem to be confused.
Which is EXACTLY the behavior Nyetscape 4 had, and why up until they made the pathetic half-assed attempt to mimic Opera, I continued to call Firefox the “sweetly retarded cousin” of Netscape 4. (well, alongside it being completely unstable and slow as molasses even compared to IE6)
A behavior SOME users (like Mallory) still turn back on, even though it’s off by default and is allegedly on the chopping block for some future version… THOUGH, with image resizing improving since we can use GPU’s to add anisotropic filtering and some new tricks with media queries. In firefox you just go into view, and choose … wait… Hey Mallory, where did they hide it in the newer versions of FF? I can’t even find zoom controls anymore. (shows how often I use FF for anything more than testing). Wow, I can’t even find a indicator of how much your zoomed in, a control other than keyboard to reset the zoom… ah, turn the ‘menu bar’ back on… so menu bar off they don’t even bother giving you a zoom control anymore? That’s… pathetic. Menu bar on, go into view -> zoom, and choose ‘zoom text only’ – and you get the “resize only text and nothing else” that for me always resulted in broken, garbage useless pages – since when I zoom USUALLY I want the page to get wider too instead of being a crappy little stripe… hence why I find zooming only the text USELESS – and don’t understand why you’d want to hunt that down – oh noes, images that have nothing to do with content might get a little blurry – here’s a tip, use a browser that doesn’t botch resizing images.
Though admittedly, I’m the same way about IE8/newer ignoring the system metric and instead starting out at 125% zoom as ‘default’… I switch that *** back instantly… wait, no I don’t, I just use a browser that actually cares about accessibility instead.
If a site is well designed (width in ems or %) the whole design expands as you increase font size only. I still use text-only zoom … and the stripe thing doesn’t bother me anyway. I don’t want to read like I’m watching a tennis match. I’d be really sad if they got rid of the text-only zoom.
If they design it right you’d have a semi fluid or fluid layout, meaning it wouldn’t increase past the sides of the page… (though don’t tell that to IE8 which apparently doesn’t resize the min/max-width on zoom) Most of the time you need to zoom it’s crappy PX metric layout with px fonts in the first place… so that zooming only text breaks.
Only time what you describe would apply is for “elastic only” layouts… Which IMHO are just as broken as declaring the width in PX.
Semi-fluid FTMFW.
Though Opera has this really nice option called “fit to width” – sometimes it breaks good layouts, but it often fixes really bad ones when zooming.
I know zooming text only breaks a lot of sites, but I have most sites I visit (where there’s a lot of reading to do) set to bigger sizes permanently (Firefox remembers the zoom setting). Wikipedia, for example. I don’t really care if the site is broken, as long as I can read the main text. I’m in the process of weaning myself off FF, though, so not sure what the future holds.
James Pearce said a few sensible things about this around 18 months ago, when the whole “responsive” thing was starting to make a lot of web designers salivate:
> One gets the sense that those promoting and using “responsive web design” in its current form secretly hope that this is all they will have to do to be able to call their sites “mobile-ready”:
> But this may give us a clue why so many others seem desperate to will the current implementation of “responsive web design” into being as the sole way to develop services for mobile users: it’s all client-side, and requires nothing more complex than a few extra tricks in existing CSS files. It may be that many web designers are daunted by the thought that they may be required to think about mobile device detection and conditional logic on the server-side, and are clinging to the hope that they can claim to support mobile users without having to do any, well, programming.
Especially take note how the St Paul’s School “responsive” site fails to be truly responsive to mobile users needs.
There are some good points there, but I think that a bigger issue is still being missed generally, and that’s what content should be on any version of a site, and how it should be organized.
I don’t think the mobile web is as different from the desktop web as TV is from radio. The difference is more like that between a fixed landline and a mobile phone. I, at least, find that I do pretty much the same on my mobile as on my desktop. I’m just as likely to want directions or dates when viewing the desktop version of a site as when I’m in the car checking the mobile. It’s it’s hard to find that information on either device, then the designer has failed.
The real revolution will be when we let go of pretty graphic sites with a ton of pointless junk on them and start the see the web (be it desktop or mobile) as a tool for delivering content in a clean and efficient way. Sadly, we seem to get further and further away from that, but this mobile revolution is causing a major rethink of that. Talking about building separate sites is to bury our heads in the sand and avoid the real issue.
Yeah, it appears that you belittle me and that the cat ate some of the text from the right side of my profile…
…and maybe some of my hair too!
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It seems that on interwebs things are turning my way: not a markup problem/solution. And boy, what an avalanche it was with “Responsive design” in the whatwg mail list!
It’s starting to look like raster may suffer some mutations too. They bring up a better use of progressive JPEG. Which pretty much comes close to the vector graphics concept: one file, multiple good looking sizes.
Anyway, overall, multiple images for the same purpose seems to really look like a bad idea for most. As it should. …in my opinion. Having multiple src’s for an image is similar to AJAX for content. Why is it a good idea to have a default AJAX for images but not for content, beats me.
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What this should be, it’s a behavior strictly related to the zoom event or with the change in display size (i.e. display turning from landscape to portrait and vice-versa). And it should be an option in CSS not in source attribute in markup. Like the multiple backgrounds CSS. Ring a bell anyone?
And all this since without style, it’s pretty much senseless to even think about responsive images. And yes, I know img is content, background is not.
Speaking of which. I guess if one aims at scamming its clients into always building two sets (or even three, as we’ve seen) of websites instead of one, even if the content is fairly light it doesn’t warrant a stripped down version, the whole responsive web design thing may seem like a “business” stealer. Under these circumstances, so called “web designers” carrying a viral load against responsive web design is to be completely understood.
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As an aside.
I don’t know, some of you may have noticed, but I have a thing for web developers with strong opinion but weak representative work. Why? Because all of us enjoy talking more than working.
James Pearce is the perfect illustration as to why I’m so bugged by these people.
He would be so much better off using responsive web design, for the following reasons:
the content on his site is fairly light, which is a good thing altogether. What’s there to cut, beats me. Only the user expectations of finding a normal web site, maybe.
going on his site from mobile (smartphone or tablet), a broken “feature” it requires you to know which version to type in in the address bar, which is the worst thing ever: who want’s to always type m.www? Not me.
if you don’t do the above m.www thing, and simply type www. another ugly issue on mobile, thanks to the same “feature”: it shows you a page, where it starts asking you: “It seems that you required the desktop version but you are on mobile”.
What the user is thinking:
What? Are you training pigs to fly? I never asked for a desktop or a mobile version of you site. I merely asked you to show me your page, that’s it, so quit bugging me with your unfinished and unpolished solutions! Arghhh, never mind!!!
There’s no better way for the OP of learning the goods and the bads than by studying real examples. Discussing specifics weighs in much much more than any arid philosophical and conceptual debate.[/ot]
Well, the day that happens is the day we’ll all have to use Apple products for everything. As a Linux user who believes in the freedom of information and the freedom of software choice, I am against his recommendations.
His studies show real problems. However his solutions to these problems will lead to an OS and device monoculture, which is neither secure nor free. I don’t want an OS that tells me what I can and cannot install. I don’t want my device tied to one publishing agent.
We all know if web developers have to make a Blackberry website, a Palm website, a Nokia/Windows Phone website, a non-Nokia Windows Phone website, an iPhone website, an iPad website, a Samsung Galaxy Tab website… that ain’t gonna happen. Developers will choose one. They’re already kinda doing that now. This means there will be no freedom of hardware or software choice… people can have any colour they want so long as it’s iColor.
It’s too bad this thing costs $300 for a PDF… I’ll have to think about it, but I’d really like to read it.
and you “forgot” to mention that. But that’s OK.
