Table of Contents for
Mastering Responsive Web Design

Version ebook / Retour

Cover image for bash Cookbook, 2nd Edition Mastering Responsive Web Design by Ricardo Zea Published by Packt Publishing, 2015
  1. Cover
  2. Table of Contents
  3. Mastering Responsive Web Design
  4. Mastering Responsive Web Design
  5. Credits
  6. About the Author
  7. Acknowledgment
  8. About the Reviewers
  9. www.PacktPub.com
  10. Preface
  11. What you need for this book
  12. Who this book is for
  13. Conventions
  14. Reader feedback
  15. Customer support
  16. 1. Harness the Power of Sass for Responsive Web Design
  17. The basic concepts of Sass for RWD
  18. Summary
  19. 2. Marking Our Content with HTML5
  20. The
  21. The
    element
  22. The
  23. The
    element
  24. The
  25. The
  26. Using WAI-ARIA landmark roles to increase accessibility
  27. A full HTML5 example page with ARIA roles and meta tags
  28. Output screenshots for desktop and mobile
  29. Summary
  30. 3. Mobile-first or Desktop-first?
  31. Sass mixins for the mobile-first and desktop-first media queries
  32. Dealing with legacy browsers
  33. How to deal with high-density screens
  34. Sometimes RWD is not necessarily the right solution
  35. Retrofitting an old website with RWD
  36. Retrofitting with AWD
  37. Retrofitting with RWD
  38. Summary
  39. 4. CSS Grids, CSS Frameworks, UI Kits, and Flexbox for RWD
  40. CSS grids
  41. CSS frameworks
  42. UI kits
  43. The pros and cons of CSS frameworks for RWD
  44. Creating a custom CSS grid
  45. Building a sample page with the custom CSS grid
  46. Stop using CSS grids, use Flexbox!
  47. Summary
  48. 5. Designing Small UIs Driven by Large Finger
  49. The posture patterns and the touch zones
  50. The nav icon – basic guidelines to consider for RWD
  51. The navigation patterns for RWD
  52. Summary
  53. 6. Working with Images and Videos in Responsive Web Design
  54. Third-party image resizing services
  55. The element and the srcset and sizes attributes
  56. Replacing 1x images with 2x images on the fly with Retina.js
  57. Making videos responsive
  58. The Vector Formats
  59. Summary
  60. 7. Meaningful Typography for Responsive Web Design
  61. Calculating relative font sizes
  62. Creating a Modular Scale for a harmonious typography
  63. Using the Modular Scale for typography
  64. Web fonts and how they affect RWD
  65. Sass mixin for implementing web fonts
  66. Using FlowType.js for increased legibility
  67. Summary
  68. 8. Responsive E-mails
  69. Don't overlook your analytics
  70. Recommendations for building better responsive e-mails
  71. Responsive e-mail build
  72. Third-party services
  73. Summary
  74. Index

Sometimes RWD is not necessarily the right solution

Take, for example, the booking section of most travel sites. The sheer amount and type of information a site like this manages makes it quite difficult to have a responsive site. When visiting the eight highest ranked travel sites in Google's search results, this is what I saw:

Here is a brief list of our findings:

  • Since Expedia acquired Travelocity, they share the same platform. The difference is in the branding; thus, I will consider these two sites as one.
  • The homepages of five out of seven sites (71 percent) are not responsive.
  • The booking pages of five out of seven sites (71 percent) are not responsive.
  • Only one site (Expedia/Travelocity) out of seven (14 percent) is fully responsive.
  • Four out of seven sites (57 percent) have no RWD whatsoever.

We can conclude that the most popular travel sites have not fully embraced RWD yet, but some are hybrids between fixed width and responsive layouts. That's why all of those sites have separate mobile apps. For them, RWD may not be a priority, so they rely on their mobile apps to balance this deficiency.

Although very rare these days, sometimes we may need to build a site or page that is not responsive. Actually, there are some pages out there today that are not responsive.

CodePen is one of the most popular frontend sandboxes out there and the editor of CodePen is not responsive. Why? Because it doesn't need to be. It's very unlikely that a developer would go to CodePen to write HTML, Sass, and JavaScript using their phone.

With that being said, if you ever need to build a site/page that doesn't need to be responsive, there are two good options as far as CSS grid systems go:

There are a few things to consider:

  • The 960 Grid System is aimed at screens 1024px wide.
  • The 1140 Grid System is aimed at screens 1280px wide.
  • The 1140 Grid System includes media queries by default, so we need to take this into account and decide whether it's best to leave them or if it's best to delete them to reduce file size and selector limitations in IE6-IE9.

Because I always thought that the 10px padding on the left and right of the 960 Grid System left the content too close to the edges of the main container, I added 10 more pixels to each side, increasing the padding to 20px—turning the 960 Grid System into a 980 Grid System. From now on, we will refer to it as the 980GS.