Building Responsive Web Applications | Hacker News Reader

Building Responsive Web Applications

mobile.smashingmagazine.com

20 pointswebpro6 comments

This post was published 2 days ago at Smashing Magazine. I'm the author and I'm wondering what you think about the approach presented, and how you have built, or would build responsive web applications.

I'm pretty sure you've seen this already: http://adioso.com/blog/2013/06/responsifying-adioso/

I'm reviewing both currently to see what the differences in your approaches are.

He doesn't use Foundation or similar.

Foundation makes building responsive websites pretty easy (with work :)).

We still use Foundation 3 because we have a couple of custom css libraries written as well, we will be upgrading to 4 soon.

I think the Adioso case is closer to an enhanced, responsive website, where my article focuses more on web applications. Just for fun, also see https://github.com/webpro/Websites-vs-Web-Applications for the difference ;-)

After looking at both, I agree and apologize for connecting the two. Despite the similarities in titles, they are different beasts. In summary, your post deals with loading of modules based on device capabilities, while the post about Adios deals mostly with responsive visual adjustments.

I have to say that while your approach to responsive web applications makes sense, it is geared toward bigger web applications. The users of the application I'm currently building need to see everything on all platforms they use, the information just needs to be displayed in a different manner. The app is also small enough that loading something only to then hide it with a media query is not really an issue. It's obvious that building bigger apps you need to take conditional loading into account, but I'm not sure where the tipping point (in terms of app size) for that is. It's also true that the tipping point is moving as mobile internet speed and general performance increases.

Not sure whether the tipping point as mentioned should even be used as an argument. That would be the same as assuming specific pixel ranges, not having touch input, or fast internet connection for "large" devices (as I point out in the article).

I think what matters is that it is possible to be responsive/adaptive based on such contextual factors. Responsive web design is basically enabling that for screen size, but there are many more factors in play.

A tipping point based on the feature-richness/robustness of a programmatic solution to go responsive is another story (i.e. it shouldn't prevent from going in that direction).

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