Thoughts and problems of responsive web design

Posted on 30th August 2012

Everyone in the world of web development is talking about responsive web design. If they’re not, they should be. If you haven’t yet joined the responsive revolution and begun to ensure your websites adapt to whatever device or screen resolution your users may be using, then it’s time to start. I’m not going to go into detail about the principal techniques of responsive design here as there are many resources available on the web, some of which I will provide links to below.

For the last few months, I have been implementing reponsive web design to all my web projects. I am always looking for ways to improve them, as well as keep up with the latest technology for providing content responsively, so I recently attended a great webinar, Optimizing Mobile Experience with Responsive Design, by Ektron.

The webinar has given me a lot of ideas, specifically about the “mobile first” methodology (more on that below). This article expresses my thoughts on the topics the webinar covered, as well as some of the general responsive web design techniques we use, and the potential problems that arise from using them on your web projects.

Opera’s supporting of the -webkit- prefix

Posted on 26th April 2012

There has been a lot of discussion over the last couple of months about other browsers implementing support of the CSS -webkit- vendor prefix, and this week an unidentified source told .net magazine that Opera have confirmed implementation of the -webkit- prefix.

Many developers are concerned. If other browsers start implementing CSS vendor prefixes other than their own, and implementing them in different ways (as often different browsers do), then surely that defeats the point of vendor prefixes entirely? The point of vendor prefixes was to ensure new, experimental CSS features are completely interoperable before standardised support was introduced. Some developers were initially against them, but most forward-thinking developers should now be used to using them to ensure the best cross-browser compatibility possible. Yes, it means we end up writing pretty much the same property declaration five or so times, but unfortunately that’s the way it is. Vendor prefixes are the best solution for us to be able to use experimental CSS properties now.