Responsive Web Design May Soon Not Be A Choice
Earlier this month I read an excerpt (that now I cannot find) where the author was writing about how the web is increasingly becoming the content repository for all of our apps. DaringFireball.net linked to a similar article on the Verge where Jason Kottke exclaimed that the web has turned into “filters on top of filters.” Today, I ran across Stephanie Rieger’s blog where she did an experiment in the iBooks Author HTML Widget which essentially will render a web page in-place when a URL is selected. The best quote was at the end of the article, “Diversity isn’t going away. It’s about to get worse. Ignore it at your peril.”
This got me thinking. With most of the apps that we are using on our devices, laptops, phones, tablets, etc., we are seeing more “in-app” web views in every shape and size. As this reality is now starting to set in for the coming year, Stephanie also highlights an article at DesignMind, where new cheaper smart devices will be coming in multiple, shapes, size and OS configurations. Essentially what this tells us is that the content we create must be as malleable as possible. We don’t know where our content or a link to our content will end up.
I for one am still sifting through how to create the perfect Responsive Workflow, so I get the best looking site at any resolution. Clearly the challenge for all Web Developers will be to build systems that reliably work on all devices without having to customize an app for every known and unknown device. The challenge for Web Designers will be to design a flexible design and be okay with it.
This quote from my WordCamp San Diego Presentation last year pretty much sums it up, “It may be an even bigger idea than we initially realized – Jeffrey Zeldman”