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Comment by freddealmeida | Hacker News Reader

I agree. Responsive design itself is not difficult. But the sell must have been a difficult one. I'd love to hear it as well. My guess is it was based on a prototype. Seems everyone these days expects you to build one :-S

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Having designed www.mogotix.com, which is completely responsive, I can say that fluid layouts absolutely create challenges that fixed layouts do not. That said, they're not insurmountable, and the benefits are substantial.

Elaborating: some things that are simple in a fixed layout can become very difficult in fluid ones.

Two brief examples: 1. Try embedding a YouTube video into a fluid layout. You'll need a JavaScript solution to remove the ugly black bands that will appear above and below your video. 2. IE 6-8 do not support media queries, which form the basis for fluid layouts. When we relaunched MogoTix in March 2011, I had to include a jQuery script to get IE to understand media queries (that script is now included by default in the 1140px grid at cssgrid.net).

If anyone has questions about implementing a fluid layout, feel free to ask.

Paravel and Chris Coyier released fitvids.js last week which solves the fluid video embeds issue pretty nicely (fitvidsjs.com).

How do you overcome making sure mobile devices don't download lots of images/interactive components they won't/don't/can't display?

I don't know about the person you're replying to, but I'll inject interactive components after page load (blocking them out so as not to cause reflowing, and hiding those blocks via media queries on inapplicable devices). Images, etc. are certainly trickier, I haven't found a good way to do that.

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