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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

Totally insane to call mobile free. No, if you spent a whole bunch of time testing on a bunch of platforms and a whole bunch more time writing things very carefully to work on a bunch of platforms then you can totally make a great experience for all of them.

I mean I get it. I also think it's insane to not support mobile. Everyone should be supporting mobile. Let's just not lie and say it's easy. It's a bunch of work that everyone should be doing. But it's still work.

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People often forget that testing cross platform functionality is difficult and time consuming. It can easily tie down designing and add more constraints than necessary. This is why I advocate focusing on essentials like usability, experience, and functionality rather than some gung-ho attitude of "we MUST be mobile first regardless."

I'm not saying everyone must ALWAYS design mobile first. I'm saying it should be our default position, like doing layout with css instead of tables.

If you have some reason to ignore mobile (and there are many good ones) then go ahead and make an exception.

My issue with desktop-first in RR is that because of the nature of the situation, there were no good reasons to make that exception.

I disagree. Of course designing mobile-first is considerably easier than trying to do it later. However, I would also say that designing mobile-first is actually easier in general, even if you never plan to target mobile specifically.

The idea is that you are designing for responsiveness. You are removing the worry about what should be on the left or the right or how wide things should be. You are focusing on what things are related, the relative importance of different things, and the content/interaction.

It doesn't have to be hard. Some visual designs can be hard to do cross device but that's conscious design choice. The implementation is not that hard if you start small and work your way up.

When developing a web application for phone, tablet and desktop, is it a good principle to use the same HTML for the three and a separate CSS for each device?

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