It's weird, when a layout is too clean it feels like the site is fake somehow.
New Boston Globe website design
71–80 of 111 posts
Re: New Boston Globe website design
#72I think responsive design that changes when resized like this is a bit annoying and unexpected. When I'm using the page and I resize it, I lose my place on the page and all the content reflows. There's nothing in traditional media that works that way.
Why would you resize your browser while reading a page?
But your question is the wrong question. The reason to have a fluid layout is to have a single version of the page that looks good on screens of all sizes, computers, tablets, and phones.
Re: New Boston Globe website design
#73Re: New Boston Globe website design
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. Responsive design itself is not difficult. But the sell must have been a difficult one. I'd love to hear it as well. My guess is it was based on a prototype. Seems everyone these days expects you to build one :-S
Having designed www.mogotix.com, which is completely responsive, I can say that fluid layouts absolutely create challenges that fixed layouts do not. That said, they're not insurmountable, and the benefits are substantial.
Two brief examples: 1. Try embedding a YouTube video into a fluid layout. You'll need a JavaScript solution to remove the ugly black bands that will appear above and below your video. 2. IE 6-8 do not support media queries, which form the basis for fluid layouts. When we relaunched MogoTix in March 2011, I had to include a jQuery script to get IE to understand media queries (that script is now included by default in the 1140px grid at cssgrid.net).
If anyone has questions about implementing a fluid layout, feel free to ask.
Re: New Boston Globe website design
#75If they're able to convert even a subset of their current audience over, journalists everywhere will rejoice.
Re: New Boston Globe website design
#76Here is one of the lines of the source code: For those who don't know, this disables user scrolling on every standards-compliant mobile device. The reason is a bug on iOS, that causes test to flow off screen when changing orientation on non-default zoom levels. http://adactio.com/journal/4470/ I really wish more sites would enable it by default, then use javascript to disable it for iOS devices. I have come across ma…
It works quite well.
javascript:(function()%20%7Bvar%20meta%20=%20document.createElement(%22meta%22);%20meta.name%20=%20%22viewport%22; meta.content%20=%20%22width=device-width,user-scalable=yes,maximum-scale=10%22;%20document.head.appendChild(meta);%7D)()
Re: New Boston Globe website design
#77I have terrible vision, and utilize the browsers zoom function a lot. On their new site, I can zoom without having to do a lot of horizontal scrolling (just in Firefox though, doesn't seem to work as well in Chrome). So, aside from the aesthetic for the masses, there's an element of accessibility here that shouldn't be overlooked.
On the plus side, you don't have the issue of links breaking because they send iOS devices to their mobile ghetto that ignores everything in the URL after the domain name.
Re: New Boston Globe website design
#78Screw the layout, whoever came up with the dependency manager is a friggin' genius.
What, a servlet that does a split and a concat?
Something doesn't need to be difficult to implement to be extremely useful.
Re: New Boston Globe website design
#79Oh, the site is pretty good too ;)
Re: New Boston Globe website design
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
What, a servlet that does a split and a concat?
Did you actually play with the url? It pulls in the dependencies in one file, in any order. The genius part is that it's creating cached custom dependencies for each page that could potentially be shared by other pages. This is the most efficient dependency management approach I've seen. For sites that could have hundreds to thousands of pages, css/js asset & dependency management is so critical. Something doesn't ne…
If you like that idea, you might want to take a look at library I am developing in my free time.
The idea is that you specify things you need (for example Mootools:Core and Mootools:More:FormValidation) and dependency manager pulls the required code with dependencies in correct order. It is in ruby, though (rack middleware + standalone packager).
http://xentronium.me/jsus/demo/
http://xentronium.me/posts/jsus-demo-packager -- some explanation