Table of Contents for
Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3 - Second Edition

Version ebook / Retour

Cover image for bash Cookbook, 2nd Edition Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3 - Second Edition by Ben Frain Published by Packt Publishing, 2015
  1. Cover
  2. Table of Contents
  3. Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3 Second Edition
  4. Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3 Second Edition
  5. Credits
  6. About the Author
  7. About the Reviewers
  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. The Essentials of Responsive Web Design
  16. Defining responsive web design
  17. Setting browser support levels
  18. Our first responsive example
  19. The shortcomings of our example
  20. Summary
  21. 2. Media Queries – Supporting Differing Viewports
  22. Media query syntax
  23. Combining media queries
  24. Using media queries to alter a design
  25. Considerations for organizing and authoring media queries
  26. Combine media queries or write them where it suits?
  27. The viewport meta tag
  28. Media Queries Level 4
  29. Summary
  30. 3. Fluid Layouts and Responsive Images
  31. Introducing Flexbox
  32. Getting Flexy
  33. Responsive images
  34. Summary
  35. 4. HTML5 for Responsive Web Designs
  36. Starting an HTML5 page the right way
  37. Easy-going HTML5
  38. New semantic elements in HTML5
  39. HTML5 text-level semantics
  40. Obsolete HTML features
  41. Putting HTML5 elements to use
  42. WCAG and WAI-ARIA for more accessible web applications
  43. Embedding media in HTML5
  44. Responsive HTML5 video and iFrames
  45. A note about 'offline first'
  46. Summary
  47. 5. CSS3 – Selectors, Typography, Color Modes, and New Features
  48. Anatomy of a CSS rule
  49. Quick and useful CSS tricks
  50. Word wrapping
  51. Facilitating feature forks in CSS
  52. New CSS3 selectors and how to use them
  53. CSS3 structural pseudo-classes
  54. CSS custom properties and variables
  55. CSS calc
  56. CSS Level 4 selectors
  57. Web typography
  58. New CSS3 color formats and alpha transparency
  59. Summary
  60. 6. Stunning Aesthetics with CSS3
  61. Box shadows
  62. Background gradients
  63. Repeating gradients
  64. Background gradient patterns
  65. Multiple background images
  66. High-resolution background images
  67. CSS filters
  68. A warning on CSS performance
  69. Summary
  70. 7. Using SVGs for Resolution Independence
  71. The graphic that is a document
  72. Creating SVGs with popular image editing packages and services
  73. Inserting SVGs into your web pages
  74. Inserting an SVG inline
  75. What you can do with each SVG insertion method (inline, object, background-image, and img)
  76. Extra SVG capabilities and oddities
  77. Animating SVG with JavaScript
  78. Optimising SVGs
  79. Using SVGs as filters
  80. A note on media queries inside SVGs
  81. Summary
  82. 8. Transitions, Transformations, and Animations
  83. CSS3 2D transforms
  84. CSS3 3D transformations
  85. Animating with CSS3
  86. Summary
  87. 9. Conquer Forms with HTML5 and CSS3
  88. Understanding the component parts of HTML5 forms
  89. HTML5 input types
  90. How to polyfill non-supporting browsers
  91. Styling HTML5 forms with CSS3
  92. Summary
  93. 10. Approaching a Responsive Web Design
  94. View and use the design on real devices
  95. Embracing progressive enhancement
  96. Defining a browser support matrix
  97. Tiering the user experience
  98. Linking CSS breakpoints to JavaScript
  99. Avoid CSS frameworks in production
  100. Coding pragmatic solutions
  101. Use the simplest code possible
  102. Hiding, showing, and loading content across viewports
  103. Validators and linting tools
  104. Performance
  105. The next big things
  106. Summary
  107. Index

Hiding, showing, and loading content across viewports

One of the commonly touted maxims regarding responsive web design is: if you don't have something on the screen at smaller viewports, you shouldn't have it there at larger ones either.

This means users should be able to accomplish all the same goals (buy a product, read an article, accomplish an interface task) at every viewport size. This is common sense. After all, as users ourselves, we've all felt the frustration of going to a website to accomplish a goal and being unable to, simply because we're using a smaller screen.

It also means that as screen real estate is more plentiful, we shouldn't feel compelled to add extra things just to fill the space (widgets, adverts, or links for example). If the user could live without those extras at smaller screen sizes, they'll manage just fine at bigger ones. Displaying extra content at larger viewport sizes also means that either the content was there at smaller viewports and was merely hidden (typically using display: none; in CSS) or it's being loaded in at a particular viewport size (with the help of JavaScript). Succinctly: either the content is loaded but not viewable, or it's viewable yet probably superfluous.

In broad terms I think the above maxim is sound advice. If nothing else, it makes designers and developers question more thoroughly the content they display on screen. However, as ever in web design, there are always going to be exceptions.

As far as possible, I resist loading in new markup for different viewports but occasionally it's a necessity. I've worked on complex user interfaces that rightfully required different markup and designs at wider viewports.

In this instance, JavaScript was used to replace one area of markup with another. It wasn't the ideal scenario but it was the most pragmatic. If, for whatever reason, the JavaScript failed, users got the smallest screen layout. They could accomplish all the same goals, just the layout was sub-optimal for achieving the task at hand.

These are the kind of choices you will likely face as you code more and more complex responsive web designs, and you'll need to use your own judgment as to what the best choice is in any given scenario. However, it's not a cardinal sin if you toggle the visibility of the odd bit of markup with display: none to achieve your goal.

Let CSS do the (visual) heavy lifting

It's a fact that JavaScript provides a level of interactivity on webpages that simply cannot be achieved with CSS alone. However, where possible, when it comes to visuals, we should still do all the heavy lifting with CSS. In practicality, this means not animating menus in, out, on and off, with JavaScript alone (I'm looking at you jQuery show and hide methods). Instead, use JavaScript to perform simple class changes on the relevant section of the markup. Then let that class change trigger the menu being shown/animated in CSS.

Tip

For the best performance, when toggling classes in the HTML, ensure you add a class as close as possible to the item you want to effect. For example, if you want a pop-up box to appear over another element, add the class on the closest shared parent element. This will ensure that, for the sake of optimal performance, only that particular section of the page is made 'dirty' and the browser shouldn't have to paint vast areas of the page again. For a great, free, course on performance, take a look at Paul Lewis's 'Browser Rendering Optimization' course: https://www.udacity.com/course/browser-rendering-optimization--ud860