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

Web fonts and how they affect RWD

Web fonts are almost mandatory to use nowadays, and I say almost because we need to be mindful of the implications they bring to our projects, and if necessary, we may actually not use them at all.

Before we get into the nitty gritty of how to work with web fonts, here are a few web font resources that may be helpful for many of you:

Now, let's see the pros and cons of using web fonts:

The advantages are:

  • They help accentuate the brand and create consistency across different media.
  • When used correctly, they make designs look more appealing.
  • There is no need to use image replacement techniques anymore.
  • This keeps the text as HTML making the content more accessible and indexable.
  • Legacy browsers support web fonts.
  • Great resources for free fonts.
  • All these in turn help keep the markup cleaner.

The disadvantages are:

  • They slow down the website/app due to HTTP requests or their dependency on third-party servers.
  • Not all web fonts are legible at small and/or large sizes.
  • If legacy browsers are required to support, there are more files to manage.
  • Licensing the use of a font requires some sort of payment: monthly, per font family, per font style, and so on.
  • Some free fonts are not well built.
  • There are rendering side effects:
    • Flash Of Unstyled Text (FOUT): On modern browsers, when the page loads, the text is first rendered on the screen with a system font, and then a second later it's swapped and styled with the web font.
    • Flash Of Invisible Text (FOIT): On legacy browsers, when the page loads, the text is not visible but a second later it's rendered with the web font.

There are others not worth getting into, such as Flash Of Fallback Text and Flash Of Faux Text (FOFT).

How to tackle all the "flash-of-whatever-texts" is not part of the scope of this section. However, I encourage you to read about Font Load Events in Zach Leatherman's article on the Opera blog called Better @font-face with Font Load Events (https://dev.opera.com/articles/better-font-face/).