Is "responsive" the new buzzword for "things that change when you resize them"? I've been seeing it used an awful lot in web design as of the past few years, often rather vaguely as some sort of feature.
What I mean is that tables are not "responsive" and laying things out with tables, while "easy" was not enough for anything more than people browsing the web on CRTs, and certainly not for thousands of different displays with varying dimensions and resolutions.
Things are good these days. You can still use tables if that's as far as you want to go, or you can do things professionally.
While that's true, I think the OP's point was we knew that emulating the old rigid model was the right thing to do and that the hindsight-is-20/20 lessons we would have had are ones that we instead will need another decade or so to obtain. We lost a lot of time.
The reason for this is understandable and depressing. Frankly most designers were far less flexible than the programmers, and preferred to rest on their own experiences rather than take advantage of the medium.
Frankly the thing that crystalized this for me was the "Cluetrain manifesto". What it said was blindingly obvious to so many of us. What shocked (and enlightened) me is that someone realized that it had to be written down. In other words most people, or at least most people in marketing and business, actually didn't understand the web and preferred to try to treat it as some sort of TV remote control with a buy button.
Of course path dependency is probably the defining factor in technical and social progress. But it doesn't mean there wasn't a missed opportunity. In fact "responsive design" is simply a minor surface metonymic element of a major missed opportunity.
The fact that things rearrange dynamically as you resize your window on a desktop box is not the main target, the target is a design working equally well on your desktop, your table in both landscape and portrait, your much smaller phone, and so forth, so the designer doesn't need to maintain multiple versions of the site/page/app.
This is the original article which named the technique: http://alistapart.com/article/responsive-web-design/
Although the technique was being used earlier than May 25, 2010.
Adaptive Web Design (responsive but on server side, not client) is the other technique popular with websites aiming to support 96% of browsers well. Because it's impossible to do that nicely for mobile browsers.
Mobile first, offline first are the other two related terms you've likely heard. Meaning design for mobile first, or offline first.
Not just change, but remove flourishes and not entirely necessary elements.
> I've been seeing it used an awful lot in web design as of the past few years, often rather vaguely as some sort of feature.
It's a feature for cross-device compatibility, the point being to alter visible content to fit multiple device sizes.