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Responsive Design may NOT be the best mobile strategy (3)

08-10-2014 01:17 AM #1 joshogle (Member)
Responsive Design may NOT be the best mobile strategy

This article does a great job of dispelling the idea that having "responsive design" as your mobile strategy is the best (or only) approach.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014...bile-strategy/

An excerpt:

While there is no silver bullet and no solutions that can be applied to every type of document, we can use a couple of tricks to improve our existing responsive solutions and maximize performance:

  • Deliver each document to all devices with the same URL and the same content, but not necessarily with the same structure.
  • When starting from scratch, follow a mobile-first approach.
  • Test on real devices what happens when resources are loaded and when display: none is applied. Don’t rely on resizing your desktop browser.
  • Use optimization tools to measure and improve performance.
  • Deliver responsive images via JavaScript while we wait for a better solution from browser vendors (such as srcset).
  • Load only the JavaScript that you need for the current device with conditional loading, and probably after the onload event.
  • Inline the initial view of a document for mobile devices, or deliver above-the-fold content first.
  • Apply a smart responsive solution with one or more of these techniques: conditional loading, responsiveness according to group, and a server-side layer (such as an adaptive approach).
The article goes into detail on these and other points, with precise instructions on how to implement a very mobile-friendly approach to your sites. Worth a read for sure, even if you don't do the design/coding (I don't), so you know better how to direct your team and know what to look out for when doing QA.

08-10-2014 01:48 AM #2 swissfactor (Member)

This is also interesting:

08-11-2014 10:24 PM #3 caurmen (Administrator)

Hm, didn't know that loading images via Javascript was considered a mature technique now. Interesting...

Thanks, great share!

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