As someone who's been asleep at the switch with regards to responsive design I get the sense that it's, well, hard. Has anyone written about the "responsive design vs forking the website for mobile" tradeoff? If I were to start hacking together a site today I would probably just create two or three completely different layouts and DRY things up as much as I could in code, instead of trying to get the stars to align and get my browser to render the same assets correctly in all browsers.
In other words, responsive design seems to bring under the fold a use case that does not exist: physically resizing a browser window from a desktop size to a mobile size and having a page render correctly as you do it. Its a nice trick, but unless you assume the same client is going to need to see the content "respond" to changes in window size, then it seems prudent to take that use case off the list and simplify the implementation around the real use case: a client with a pre-defined browser window size hits a page and renders it, full stop. (with some small flexibility since users on desktop browsers do resize their window by some % occasionally) (Ie, if you focus on this case, simplest solution may be to fork it at render time in code where you have to and keep the CSS/etc straightforward.)
