A different way of looking at responsive design: Intention.js | Hacker News Reader

A different way of looking at responsive design: Intention.js

intentionjs.com

134 pointsjoe875643853 comments

Reading the comments, I guess I am the only guy who still doesn't believe in responsive design in the first place.

I just haven't seen a really good implementation of it from a behavior perspective, regardless of what framework or technique is used under the hood. I mean, stacking a three column desktop layout into a single long column for phones is not desirable to me.

And, when I view a full desktop site on a phone or tablet with higher resolution (which is where devices are going), it is typically very readable with the browser's auto-sizing to fit. In rare cases, there is always zooming when necessary. But, resolutions across devices will soon be such that supporting at most two different resolution ranges would be all that is required, if that.

Even if there are rare cases wherein a specific UI can benefit from desktop space where available, with responsive design you'd be making a conscious decision to build a less desirable experience for mobile and other devices. That would imply a separate site with its own UI, optimized as much as possible for the smaller screens. In this case, why try to do so much with each page? Media queries, extensive markup, etc. are effectively adding big, nasty if statements throughout the code. It is ungainly and hard to maintain, even while delivering a sub-par experience. So, if you really are trying to deliver a remarkably different experience per screen format, then it is better to consider a separate site/page-set, IMO.

I think higher resolutions, better browser capabilities, and other changes will make responsive design a "remember when" in the not-too-distant future. And Web designers/devs will breathe a collective sigh of relief, just as we have all done in the past when various painful and short-lived fads went the way of the dinosaur.

But again, maybe that's just me!

I appreciate your concerns about responsive design, namely the logistical and performance-related issues of creating a separate user experience for mobile devices.

I'd like to add that responsive design doesn't have to be an annoying exercise in which developers try to flatten a full-featured site into one column. On the contrary, they can begin by developing a site that works well for mobile, then expand it into a Desktop version.

Designing the mobile experience first can be conceptually useful because it helps developers zero in on the features that are most essential. I did this recently while creating a mobile browser-based geocaching app. I would have liked to have created a single version for mobile and Desktop. Device resolutions are improving, as you said, but I knew that my prospective users had iPhones and Androids with relatively small screens.

Developing a minimalistic version of my Web app in the beginning helped me to focus and hone in on the most important features. This approach may not work in all cases, but I think it's a useful aspect (maybe a side effect) of responsive design.

Good points.

I probably should have been clear that the one column thing was just an example. I agree that there is certainly more to responsive design than that, else it would be much easier!

But, what you mentioned with regard to being more thoughtful about the design and distilling it to its minimalistic essence is partly where I was going, except to a different conclusion. That is, if such a clean, focused design can be achieved, then what results is a Web app that could likely work well across devices.

But, if that minimalistic design leaves much to be desired on the desktop (i.e. a remarkably better experience can be delivered because of the additional available real estate, well then we are likely talking about a fundamentally different design. In that case, I say build it out separately vs. trying to have each page, CSS, etc. pull double-duty.

>Developing a minimalistic version of my Web app in the beginning helped me to focus [...] it's a useful aspect of responsive design

Good point. But, I think that's more a side effect of mobile-first than responsive design.

Fwiw, I think Quartz nailed it. Simple, clear, and easy to use at every screen size. At smartphone size, the content menu and content pane shift from side-by-side to Z-index stacked or off-canvas.

Select an article, and the content menu slides off canvas revealing the content pane with the article. Use the back arrow in the top left to get back to the content menu.

I also like how the trend of responsive/mobile-first design focuses developers and designers on content and performance over chrome and whizzbang, reducing information and sensory overload. Microsoft's Metro design language being one of the most developed expressions of those goals.

http://qz.com/

http://foundation.zurb.com/off-canvas.php

I think this is absolutely incredible. This is exactly how I've always envisioned responsive design.

I'm really looking forward to the usual HN pessimistic discussion on why this is bad/wrong/could be done better. I know a lot of people don't like the negativity, but I really enjoy it because I get pumped up about stuff like this. WSJ is pretty reputable too.

My biggest complaints with it are that this mixes up content and presentation concerns again and we already have great tools for declarative responsive design. After however many years of working to get people to separate their content from their presentation, tools like this rush back in and encourage people to again start smashing them together. Being a Javascript tool, it also means that if a client doesn't run your JS for whatever reason, your entire site becomes rather unusable (you'll notice a lack of default/fallback classes and whatnot in the examples provided).

> Where should your advertising code get placed when you're on a desktop? Does the page require an alternate slideshow widget on touch enabled devices?

These are adaptive content concerns (the type of content served is adapted to fit the client, generally through progressive enhancement), rather than a responsive concerns (the content served is presented according to the client's metrics and capabilities). Completely valid use case here, IMO. Pitching it as an adaptive content library would be much nicer, because there actually is a need for good tools to do that well, whereas responsive content is basically fully handled by media queries and a tiny sprinkling of non-presentational Modernizr.

The lib is very, very flexible, so you could code a responsive site that worked via non-JS methods, then use it solely for progressive enhancement. It's basically a way to set arbitrary content rules within the content (A relates to B in a certain way when this is true, and in a different way when that is true) and define the interactions, reasonings, and timing in the script.

Completely agreed, and I like it a lot for that use case. I'm just not wild about it basically being pitched as a married-to-the-markup alternative to CSS.

After however many years of working to get people to separate their content from their presentation

Counter-point: content and presentation are not always separate. Particularly in news (this comes from the Wall Street Journal) immersive articles like Snow Fall (http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/) are very popular. We need to cover those cases, too.

Acknowledged and agreed. I work in news, and believe me, Snow Fall comes up frequently. But, it's worth noting that while the presentation is a major part of the experience there, it's also an extremely mobile-unfriendly experience. It's a beautiful, gorgeous presentation that makes some very specific assumptions about the classes of devices it's going to render on - entirely the opposite intent of something like this library.

I'm concerned less about clients not running JS (well, Googlebot, but solvable) but more about the first-load page experience being weird. I wonder how they've solved this.

However I really have to challenge the idea that separating content and presentation concerns is a worthwhile endeavor.

The idea of CSS selectors was introduced to reduce the coupling of style and markup in the name of "separation of concerns" and is arguably the least-maintainable technology we have to deal with on the Web today. It increases complexity because markup and presentation will always be tightly coupled and hey, they're pretty cohesive too, and CSS gives us a big global namespace and thrown-together specificity semantics that aren't backed by any underlying theory.

Now that we have ARIA the accessibility excuse for separating presentation from content loses much of its weight.

And really, how many times have you completely reskinned a site with just CSS? You can't even change the order of inline items.

BTW, I'm not a CSS hater per se -- I really like media queries, how it describes text, and many of its layout options -- but the idea of using selectors to decouple it from the DOM has resulted in far more problems than solutions.

Author here. Thanks for all of the comments it's been fun watching the dialog unfold!

A few notes:

This solution will, in most cases, be part of a broader "responsive" strategy. Would all content from larger contexts get delivered to a mobile device? Shouldn't! But that's not this library's responsibility.

The library is an abstraction of responsiveness, for lack of better term. intention.js creates a framework for describing thresholds (mobile-phone) on an axis (width) and how they change. The thresholds and axes described here and in the documentation are not part of intention.js, they're an implementation of common responsive concerns.

The separation between presentation and content is entirely up to the developer or designer implementing the library. For example, you may decide to implement the application of grid specific classes on width-context change (presentation). But maybe you only care about swapping high res images out for the smaller ones on high speed connections or devices that have high res displays (content). Or a combination of both presentation and content: you would like to place a section of the page somewhere else in the evening, a portal to long form articles. you get the idea...

Going forward I'm looking into creating generators for implementations of intention.js for common responsive concerns (variety of widths, touch, etc.). Removing the dependencies on jquery and underscore. More documentation! And etc.

While very well executed, the basic idea of delivering a document that doesn't make sense without javascript just seems wrong to me.

I've always thought the real promise of responsive design is "mobile first", delivering a basic document that works on its own, then enhancing layout/resolution for larger viewports and browser capabilities using CSS. This approach basically does the opposite.

I'm not sure what mobile first has to do with javascript dependencies. The reality is that all modern browsers (and web sites in general) expect a working, modern javascript engine.

With that said, if you disable JS on the author's page it still renders content fine.

My rule of thumb is simple: web apps can require JS, but web sites never should.

I had a look at the source and I must say I really prefer how Bootstrap does it.

Compare:

  <div id="all" class="standard" intent in-width: in-container: in-orientation:>
  <section id="smallCode" class="clearFix standard" intent in-width: in-container: data-pattern="2">
  <div id="pseudosmalltablet" intent in-pseudosmalltablet-class="toggleOrientation"  in-base-class="null"></div>

etc. to

  <div class="col-md-6">
  <div class="col-xs-6">
  <div class="hide-xs">

Ok, but its still client side which I don't like. You're making the mobile device download all this markup, and then utilize further CPU cycles to discard that markup. It should run server side.

So you'd have to refresh the page when you change phone orientation from portrait to landscape?

The server could just give the requesting device what it needs to display the content in both orientations. That doesn't necessitate also giving it the layout for 10 other possible screen sizes.

While most mobile devices have exactly 2 size, that may not be a good assumption. There are some devices that support split-screen and you would end up with more that just 2 sizes. You could send a list of all possible sizes, but If the split-screen is customizable it maybe not be feasible to enumerate all of them.

You user can define the 'measurer' function, and what triggers a measure. I think the defaults check for the onorientationchange event, with a polling fallback.

Unintentional straw-man argument. If the device adapts from 400px width to 300px, then there's no need to send me the markup that's applicable to 600px.

Github for example serves different markup to mobile, while simultaneously implementing responsive design on client side.

Responsive design is great until you force my phone to download 0.25mb of HTML it will never render. So what I'm suggesting is two layouts, both responsive.. one for desktops, other layout (also responsive) is for mobile devices.

While the demo site doesn't go this far, it would be possible to send minimal code to the client with basic client-sniffing 'intentions', then use that information to trigger some wacky ajax or redirect with more targeted markup.

Many 'intentions' respond to live events, so sometimes it makes sense to give all the markup up front. Take a look at some of the goofier examples, like animation (http://intentionjs.com/2013/03/12/walking-man.html).

Server side device stuff is annoyingly hard to get 100% correct though, you need to get a giant library that needs to be updated every week and requires a massive amount of resources to scan over the list of devices to find the one that is currently browsing.

But I kinda of agree, if you are browsing at 400px's you shouldn't be getting stuff for 1024px's. And vice versa.

No. The entire purpose of responsive design is that it adapts to the client that is being used to view it.

Why can't this adaptation happen on the server? Client tells server what the resolution possibilities are ("the current browser size is X by Y, and my screen size (and thus maximum browser size) is W by Z), and server gives back only styles relevant to that size. On mobile devices where the browser is always fullscreen, that means a maximum of two layouts (horizontal, vertical).

Because clients don't send this information to the server (and if they did, its validity would be suspect), and because browser layout engines and CSS are already designed to be independent of specific device metrics. It's a solution to a problem that doesn't need solving.

It sends the User-Agent, which can be used to determine whether it's the desktop or not. It doesn't solve the portrait and landscape changing problem. So some client-side responsive design would still need to be used.

I think a hybrid approach would be too tedious for someone developing a website to do, in order to get the payoff of sending less to mobile browsers, but it may be worth implementing in a framework.

1) User agents lie. Frequently.

2) A user agent doesn't encode any information about the actual metrics of the device.

Doing layout by user agent is basically a worst-case hellhole of browser-specific codebase fragmentation. There's a very good reason why best practices have been trending away from "test for vendor class" and towards "test for agent capabilities".

Well a sufficiently complex framework could deal with it, by making another trip to the server if it discovers the code being sent down the first time isn't good enough.

The fact that I'm on a desktop does not take into account that my browser window may be smaller than my 'desktop screen'. Responsive is the way to go because it works.

It sends the User-Agent, which can be used to determine whether it's the desktop or not.

What is "desktop"? An MS Surface Pro would report as a desktop browser, but it's a touch interface. You can also resize the browser window- what then?

So some client-side responsive design would still need to be used.

Which is the point. The server can't know conclusively so why make it try?

CSS3 media queries can often fulfill the missing link for screen sizes, aspect ratios, etc.

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/

I didn't mean to imply that this is possible with technology we have at the moment. A piece of JavaScript code (framework, perhaps) could surely send the needed data, and for those with JS disabled, the page could fail over to using media queries (to be exact, it would need to load the media query version the first time your site is loaded, but could immediately redirect to the lighter JS version if you have JS enabled and the light/JS version would be loaded for future requests).

Checkout these guys out ,100% server side solution http://www.codewithsnow.com/portal/snow/gettingstarted I am going to download tomcat version now ....

Nice emulator: http://codewithsnow.com/emulator/

Look at Github. They serve different markup to mobile devices. Responsive design is great, but for a fast mobile experience you need to do some processing server side. There's still a place for responsive design (ex. flipping phone's orientation causes design to respond). That doesn't have to entail including markup that never renders on that particular device.

What you're describing is not responsive design. Just a mobile website; you're comparing apples and oranges.

That's interesting, but I'd expect their website to actually use their own product appropriately when viewing from my mobile devices. The "examples" page works, but isn't really in a well designed format - font headings are too large, text is pushed all the way to the far left without a single pixel margin causing it to look like the page should scroll horizontally, etc...

I like the concept of what they're doing, but if their site is using it, then I'm not interested.

What device is looking wonky? It's much more likely the CSS just needs a fix. It sounds like the library itself is working correctly.

Nokia Lumia 920

Very interesting. The main issue I see is it assume all desktops to be equal. Responsive design is about supporting a range of viewport dimensions and not about about a range of devices.

If I'm on a desktop browser and my window size is the same width as a tablet, then rearrange things to fit in tablet size rather than keeping at the desktop size and forcing me to scroll left/right. The demos work nice when you change devices but when you adjust your desktop window you get the same site whether you're 800px wide or 1920px wide.

This threw me off as well. Hopefully they'll fix it quickly, I think it's a great project otherwise.

Folks check this out a clear alternative to responsive design and intention.js ( 100% server side .. easy to follow) http://www.codewithsnow.com/portal/snow/gettingstarted I am downloading the tomcat version now ….

wow! they have a nice multi device emulator http://codewithsnow.com/emulator/

Interesting demo site design as well. Not sure if I love it, but the speckled header was definitely memorable.

How does this library do anything better than Bootstrap, Foundation or any of the hundreds or so frameworks/libraries already out there??

I'm at a point where if I see a responsive library, it really has to be a big leap over what's currently out there. Not sure this is a huge leap from existing options.

How would this work with dynamically injected HTML (e.g. client side templates)?

there's a method intent.add you pass your node to and it will perform all manipulations on it and keep it registered for any future changes.

Cool, thanks. I assume there's an intent.remove as well?

Also is there a more in depth documentation on this or are you on the dev team?

Yes, intent.remove works as well.

I thought we all learned to stop creating arbitrary HTML attributes years ago?

I don't think anything could be further from the truth. If anything, I think HTML is very much embracing this direction with web components and their underlying technology, ShadowDOM[1].

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/shadow-dom/

I'm not exactly fond of web components or the shadow DOM either. They wreak of XUL/XML.

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