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

Preface

Before the days of Responsive Web Design, web designers' and frontend developers' efforts were pretty much focused on translating print layouts into websites and applications. Elements and dimensions were rigid, and the need for them to adapt and scale wasn't part of the concepts we mandatorily have to account for today.

Devices come in many shapes and sizes. All sorts of screen densities, aiming our work for operating systems and browsers that support (or don't support) certain HTML, CSS and JavaScript technologies, UX principles, usability best practices, and knowing how mobile devices affect the world we live in are now an "intricate" part of what we do as web designers and frontend developers.

In this book, I provide a lot of information, technical and conceptual, about how RWD provides a pathway to better websites and web apps. Installing and using Sass, handling images and videos, and creating a solid typographic scale to building responsive e-mails are a few of the content gems you'll be able to read in this book.

Time to level up!

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Harness the Power of Sass for Responsive Web Design, starts with the easiest walkthrough you'll ever read on how to install Sass; then we learn how to make Sass "watch" our SCSS files. Then, there are easy-to-understand explanations about basic Sass concepts such as variables, mixins, arguments, nesting, partial files, the @import directive, source maps, and Sass comments. We also learn to automate vendor prefixing and automatically compile our SCSS files with Prepros. We talk about creating mixins to address media queries as easily as possible, considering how content defines the breakpoints.

Chapter 2, Marking Our Content with HTML5, clarifies that HTML is a markup language, not code. Then, we talk about the most used HTML5 elements that allow us to markup our content semantically. Improving the accessibility of our builds with ARIA roles is also something we address in a simple way. We also talk about the different meta tags required for RWD, and then we have an example that brings everything together.

Chapter 3, Mobile-first or Desktop-first?, demystifies why and when mobile-first or desktop-first should be used. With examples, we will learn how to retrofit a site with Adaptive Web Design, and of course, with RWD. We will learn about Respond.js and conditional classes in order to support legacy browsers when building mobile-first.

Chapter 4, CSS Grids, CSS Frameworks, UI Kits, and Flexbox for RWD, helps us understand what a grid is, how to use it, and why. With this understanding, we can make sound decisions when building a website or web app. We also create a custom CSS grid both with the floats technique and then by using Flexbox. We will use conditional classes again to address old browsers, and with the help of a small script, we can take care of the quirks from IE10 with an .ie10 specific selector.

Chapter 5, Designing Small UIs Driven by Large Finger, shows how usability and accessibility play a major role in this chapter. We also find explanations about the different sizes of our target zones, the location of our controls (links, buttons, form fields, and so on), and the touch zones in different devices. There are also three examples on how to create a menu button plus three more examples on mobile navigation patterns.

Chapter 6, Working with Images and Videos in Responsive Web Design, is one of the most interesting chapters of this book because images in RWD are a "thing". We will talk about different ways to serve different images with the <picture> element and the srcset attribute. Making videos responsive with CSS, jQuery, and JavaScript is also addressed in this chapter. We also learn about using vector-based files such as icon fonts and SVGs.

Chapter 7, Meaningful Typography for Responsive Web Design, talks about using relative units being ideal because they provide scalability, and this is what RWD is all about. The golden egg in this chapter is that we will learn how to use the Modular Scale to create a harmonious typographic scale. We will also use Flowtype.js to increase the legibility of our copy.

Chapter 8, Responsive E-mails, shows that e-mails are opened more on mobile devices than on desktops; that responsive e-mails have more engagement on mobile devices than nonresponsive ones; and that people click on e-mails on desktops more than on mobile. We will also create an e-mail template as an example. We'll learn to use a CSS reset block to normalize those quirky e-mail clients and learn that the best width for e-mails is not more than 600 pixels.

All these chapters have CodePen demos.