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A different way of looking at responsive design: Intention.js

intentionjs.com

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Re: A different way of looking at responsive design: Intention.js

#31

Post by jmhnilbog »

j_k_s wrote: post #10

That's interesting, but I'd expect their website to actually use their own product appropriately when viewing from my mobile devices. The "examples" page works, but isn't really in a well designed format - font headings are too large, text is pushed all the way to the far left without a single pixel margin causing it to look like the page should scroll horizontally, etc... I like the concept of what they're doing, bu…

What device is looking wonky? It's much more likely the CSS just needs a fix. It sounds like the library itself is working correctly.

Re: A different way of looking at responsive design: Intention.js

#32

Post by peterhunt »

cheald wrote: post #7
samsnelling wrote: post #2

I think this is absolutely incredible. This is exactly how I've always envisioned responsive design. I'm really looking forward to the usual HN pessimistic discussion on why this is bad/wrong/could be done better. I know a lot of people don't like the negativity, but I really enjoy it because I get pumped up about stuff like this. WSJ is pretty reputable too. MIT licesnse for everything Copyright (c) 2012 The Wall St…

My biggest complaints with it are that this mixes up content and presentation concerns again and we already have great tools for declarative responsive design. After however many years of working to get people to separate their content from their presentation, tools like this rush back in and encourage people to again start smashing them together. Being a Javascript tool, it also means that if a client doesn't run yo…

I'm concerned less about clients not running JS (well, Googlebot, but solvable) but more about the first-load page experience being weird. I wonder how they've solved this.

However I really have to challenge the idea that separating content and presentation concerns is a worthwhile endeavor.

The idea of CSS selectors was introduced to reduce the coupling of style and markup in the name of "separation of concerns" and is arguably the least-maintainable technology we have to deal with on the Web today. It increases complexity because markup and presentation will always be tightly coupled and hey, they're pretty cohesive too, and CSS gives us a big global namespace and thrown-together specificity semantics that aren't backed by any underlying theory.

Now that we have ARIA the accessibility excuse for separating presentation from content loses much of its weight.

And really, how many times have you completely reskinned a site with just CSS? You can't even change the order of inline items.

BTW, I'm not a CSS hater per se -- I really like media queries, how it describes text, and many of its layout options -- but the idea of using selectors to decouple it from the DOM has resulted in far more problems than solutions.

Re: A different way of looking at responsive design: Intention.js

#33

Post by dubcanada »

joshribakoff wrote: post #16
orph wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you'd have to refresh the page when you change phone orientation from portrait to landscape?

Unintentional straw-man argument. If the device adapts from 400px width to 300px, then there's no need to send me the markup that's applicable to 600px. Github for example serves different markup to mobile, while simultaneously implementing responsive design on client side. Responsive design is great until you force my phone to download 0.25mb of HTML it will never render. So what I'm suggesting is two layouts, both…

Server side device stuff is annoyingly hard to get 100% correct though, you need to get a giant library that needs to be updated every week and requires a massive amount of resources to scan over the list of devices to find the one that is currently browsing.

But I kinda of agree, if you are browsing at 400px's you shouldn't be getting stuff for 1024px's. And vice versa.

Re: A different way of looking at responsive design: Intention.js

#34

Post by nostrademons »

benatkin wrote: post #11
cheald wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because clients don't send this information to the server (and if they did, its validity would be suspect), and because browser layout engines and CSS are already designed to be independent of specific device metrics. It's a solution to a problem that doesn't need solving.

It sends the User-Agent, which can be used to determine whether it's the desktop or not. It doesn't solve the portrait and landscape changing problem. So some client-side responsive design would still need to be used. I think a hybrid approach would be too tedious for someone developing a website to do, in order to get the payoff of sending less to mobile browsers, but it may be worth implementing in a framework.

CSS3 media queries can often fulfill the missing link for screen sizes, aspect ratios, etc.

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/

Re: A different way of looking at responsive design: Intention.js

#35

Post by akdetrick »

While very well executed, the basic idea of delivering a document that doesn't make sense without javascript just seems wrong to me.

I've always thought the real promise of responsive design is "mobile first", delivering a basic document that works on its own, then enhancing layout/resolution for larger viewports and browser capabilities using CSS. This approach basically does the opposite.

Re: A different way of looking at responsive design: Intention.js

#37

Post by bstar77 »

akdetrick wrote: post #35

While very well executed, the basic idea of delivering a document that doesn't make sense without javascript just seems wrong to me. I've always thought the real promise of responsive design is "mobile first", delivering a basic document that works on its own, then enhancing layout/resolution for larger viewports and browser capabilities using CSS. This approach basically does the opposite.

I'm not sure what mobile first has to do with javascript dependencies. The reality is that all modern browsers (and web sites in general) expect a working, modern javascript engine.

With that said, if you disable JS on the author's page it still renders content fine.

Re: A different way of looking at responsive design: Intention.js

#38

Post by sdm »

Very interesting. The main issue I see is it assume all desktops to be equal. Responsive design is about supporting a range of viewport dimensions and not about about a range of devices.

If I'm on a desktop browser and my window size is the same width as a tablet, then rearrange things to fit in tablet size rather than keeping at the desktop size and forcing me to scroll left/right. The demos work nice when you change devices but when you adjust your desktop window you get the same site whether you're 800px wide or 1920px wide.

Re: A different way of looking at responsive design: Intention.js

#39

Post by lukifer »

akdetrick wrote: post #35

While very well executed, the basic idea of delivering a document that doesn't make sense without javascript just seems wrong to me. I've always thought the real promise of responsive design is "mobile first", delivering a basic document that works on its own, then enhancing layout/resolution for larger viewports and browser capabilities using CSS. This approach basically does the opposite.

My rule of thumb is simple: web apps can require JS, but web sites never should.

Re: A different way of looking at responsive design: Intention.js

#40

Post by aroman »

rubiquity wrote: post #36

I thought we all learned to stop creating arbitrary HTML attributes years ago?

I don't think anything could be further from the truth. If anything, I think HTML is very much embracing this direction with web components and their underlying technology, ShadowDOM[1].

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/shadow-dom/

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