lucy24, I'm talking about clinically retarded and downs syndrome people, I am not using those terms derisively, nor metaphorically, beyond wondering what on earth is making the idiots who are breaking formerly good websites with their 'responsive' hacks confuse average non critically handicapped people for severely handicapped ones. I assume you haven't spent much time with such people, nor watched them try to do things requiring coordination. If you had, you'd know what I am talking about. Don't mistake the term 'handicapped' for severe mental disorders, which is what it appears most generic responsive garbage I see out there seems to be confused about. Even milder mental disorders that I've been around, like normal autistic spectrum people, have real issues with basic coordination things you and I take for granted.
MrSavage, how can anyone have a different reaction to some morons who had a high information density page slash it down 10x for NO benefit to the desktop user?
Of course responsive can be done well, that was never in question, but following google's advice to design for mobile first is not how you do that, because a mobile first html structure is hard to make desktop friendly (hard, not impossible), but a desktop first structure is pretty easy to make mobile friendly.
MrSavage, yes, I think you are wrong in a sense, I am using VERY light responsive which only trips for mobile devices, and then also browser detection which serves core site structure css to the mobile device or desktop, treating tablets as desktops. I saw some really stupid comments about how bad it is to use browser detection instead of highly unstable and very ureliable media queries, which require constant and ongoing tweaks to handle new scenarios, so my solution was to use a good browser detection method and not pretend that I could really do a good css set of rules that would apply to both mobile and desktop structures. As time goes on, I'll pull more of those rules off the specific style sheets and onto the main ones, but I found this method worked really well for our type of layout. Still many mobile issus to resolve.
And, much to my amusement, as I was testing a specific useragent from a phone that hadn't tripped (actually it had, but there was an unrelated bug), I forgot I was surfing as a phone, and lo and behold, I did a google search, and, of course, they are using... browser detection in their searches. LOL. So remember, do as I do, not as I say. That's because browser detection is easier and way more reliable once you have a good detection logic, which I do. Fine tune with responsive after that, that way you can create core structures that are right for both types.
If you accept the normal human brain's max line width, then desktop responsive, except for very narrow devices like portrait mode tablets and maybe handling a bit of menu line height expansion for touch devices, is in my opinion totally pointless, and I speak as someone who had full top/bottom left/right liquid layouts going LONG before most people here were able to do that, but I never used those commercially because frankly I think they look like cr@p, and are only interesting intellectually and as a puzzle to learn the limits of current css. I like responsive stuff when it's used in moderation though, it's useful.
All I know is that with the methods I'm using, our site on mobile blows away in terms of speed to show full page most big sites out there. Probably the most lethal thing you can do for mobile performance is use those jquery addon that force the page by rewriting the html/css to responsive, which much decimate battery life on mobile devices.
But yes, we both are feeling the pain of the dumbing down and clunkification of the desktop space.
Even allegedly developer oriented sites like github seem unable to grasp the most elementary concepts of information density for desktops.
I'm seeing completely flattened down, unimaginative and revolting changes to sites that weren't that way before.
Don't forget 'clunky', 'blocky', 'information poor', 'wasted screen space', 'insulting my intelligence by creating something that looks like it was designed for preschoolers who still can't get the round peg into the round hole on their toys'.
I'd say there's no good way to properly handle mobile without responsive, and I found it easier to slice out the core structural css and split them into mobile / desktop versions and then leave the rest to be slightly modified for responsive but not a lot.
And the mobile css uses more responsive, to handle portrait/landscape switches, which are groovy to play with, that's how I know my code is stable and works, if it goes back and forth seamlessly between portrait and landscape adjustments.
This garbage being tossed out here is I think caused by kids who spend far too much time on mobile. I have a personal suspicion that overuse of a smartphone actually makes you stupid, otherwise I simply cannot explain how so little information on a screen of any size is a good thing.
Yesterday I came across a desktop site that was giving me fonts about 20 pixels give or take big, maybe even bigger, as default, and margins of at least 3 to 5 em between blocks of text. Stuff like that will suck equally badly on desktop and mobile, so it's very hard to know what is going on these developer's brains to be honest, are they idiots? does smart phone abuse make you stupid? I really honestly cannot say, I've never seen anything like this in all my years of doing web work, it's the worst, as I noted, thing I've ever seen hit the internet.
But it does not need to be bad, but, sad to say, to make it not bad means it's not generic, and that requires understanding css adequately, as well as understanding long standing usability rules that are being tossed out the window (you know, having to discover triggers is not as good as having clear pointers/text), more clicks is bad (and a corollary we should add, more scrolling to reach content is bad when less works well). So I think what we're seeing is a generation that has no clue about usability, that copies other garbage, that does not understand information presentation, that wants something to drop into their wordpress blog masquerading as a cms, and god knows what other absurdities are becoming prevalent nowadays out there. But no, you don't need a mobile friendly site to be bad or dumbed down, though the navigation issue is hard to solve for sure, we haven't finished that yet, it will take some thought.
[edited by: lizardx at 8:07 pm (utc) on Apr 7, 2015]
Google mobile algo to be bigger than Panda / Penguin as deadline looms
