Table of Contents for
Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3 Essentials

Version ebook / Retour

Cover image for bash Cookbook, 2nd Edition Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3 Essentials by Asoj Talesra Published by Packt Publishing, 2016
  1. Cover
  2. Table of Contents
  3. Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3 Essentials
  4. Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3 Essentials
  5. Credits
  6. About the Authors
  7. About the Reviewer
  8. www.PacktPub.com
  9. Preface
  10. What you need for this book
  11. Who this book is for
  12. Conventions
  13. Reader feedback
  14. Customer support
  15. 1. Introducing Responsive Web Design
  16. Exploring how RWD works
  17. Understanding the elements of RWD
  18. Appreciating the importance of RWD
  19. Comparing RWD to adaptive design
  20. Preparing our development environment
  21. Considering a suitable strategy
  22. Exploring best practices
  23. Setting up a development workflow
  24. Exploring mistakes
  25. Summary
  26. 2. Creating Fluid Layouts
  27. Understanding the different layout types
  28. Setting the available viewport for use
  29. Exploring the benefits of flexible grid layouts
  30. Understanding the mechanics of grid layouts
  31. Implementing a prebuilt grid layout
  32. Exploring the use of flexbox
  33. Visiting the future
  34. Taking it further
  35. Summary
  36. 3. Adding Responsive Media
  37. Making video responsive
  38. Making text fit on screen
  39. Summary
  40. 4. Exploring Media Queries
  41. Understanding media queries
  42. Identifying common breakpoints
  43. Putting our theory into practice
  44. Creating some practical examples
  45. Examining some common mistakes
  46. Exploring best practices
  47. Taking things further
  48. Summary
  49. 5. Testing and Optimizing for Performance
  50. Understanding why pages load slowly
  51. Optimizing the performance
  52. Testing the performance of our site
  53. Best practices
  54. Providing support for older browsers
  55. Considering cross-browser compatibility
  56. Testing site compatibility
  57. Following best practices
  58. Summary

Exploring the benefits of flexible grid layouts

Now that we've been introduced to grid layouts as a tenet of responsive design, it's a good opportunity to explore why we should use them. Creating a layout from scratch can be time consuming and needs lots of testing; there are some real benefits from using a grid layout:

  • Grids make for a simpler design: Instead of trying to develop the proverbial wheel, we can focus on providing the content instead; the infrastructure will have already been tested by the developer and other users.
  • They provide for a visually appealing design: Many people prefer content to be displayed in columns, so grid layouts make good use of this concept to help organize content on the page.
  • Grids can of course adapt to different size viewports: The system they use makes it easier to display a single codebase on multiple devices, which reduces the effort required for developers to maintain and webmasters to manage.
  • Grids help with the display of adverts: Google has been known to favor sites which display genuine content and not those where it believes the sole purpose of the site is for ad generation; we can use the grid to define specific areas for adverts, without getting in the way of natural content.

All in all, it makes sense to familiarize ourselves with grid layouts; the temptation is of course to use an existing library. There is nothing wrong with this, but to really get the benefit out of using them, it's good to understand some of the basics around the mechanics of grid layouts and how this can help with the construction of our site.

Let's take a quick look first at how we would calculate the widths of each element, an important part of creating any grid layout.