A response to responsive web design

We may only be two weeks in but 2012 looks like being an exciting year in web development, with new technologies and methods starting to take hold on the web.

As HTML5 and CSS3 become more prominent on the web, they are casting off the shackles from designers and front end developers who’ve been restricted from expressing themselves and pushing the technologies that are available to them to the limits.

Thankfully, IE6 is starting to feel like an old childhood nightmare rather than a persistent problem for developers. IE7 and 8 still pose problems, but with Google shunning IE7 with its support for Google+, it will only be a matter of time before IE7 follows its cousin towards the light at the end of the dark tunnel.

Parallax scrolling

With designers and developers taking advantage of not having to cater for the older, non-compliant browser, we’re starting to see some exciting work appear on the web. Parallax scrolling websites are adding layers of depth to sites and, when implemented properly, can give a superb user experience. The Nike better world site is a great example of this. Although the site has been around for a while, you’ll be hard pushed to find a better example of parallax scrolling on the web.

HTML5 canvas tag

With the introduction of the canvas tag in HTML5, I believe we’ll start to see the beginning of a new era of interactive websites which hasn’t been seen before. CSS3 animations and transitions will see an end to Flash and will give a new experience to mobile users.

Responsive web design

But if there is one new web trend that is really grabbing my attention, it has to be responsive web design. It might not carry all the bells and whistles of the aforementioned technologies but its going to have the biggest impact on how we as designers and developers work when building websites.

Responsive design is where the content within a website reacts to its surroundings. In other words, it is delivered to best fit the screen size the end-user is viewing the site on. The obvious advantage of this is with smartphones and tablets. For developers, we only need to code one template and the stylesheet, using media queries, handles the rendering for the different screen sizes.

Desktop benefits

Although responsive design is seen as a major advantage for mobile users, desktop users can also take advantage of responsive design’s unique benefits. The way we use computers and the web has changed vastly over the years; we want content and we want it now.

For example, if a school or college student is researching something on the web and wants both their browser and their word processor open and visible on the screen, Windows 7 (with its handy snap feature) will allow the screen space to be shared equally between the two applications. But how do they avoid having the awkward horizontal scroll bar appearing in the browser?

This is where responsive design comes into its own for the desktop user. The content is automatically adapted and delivered in a way which fits the browser space and which is perfectly readable and usable.

This will revolutionise the way users research on the internet. For the brands that choose 2012 as the year in which they adopt responsive design, the future holds exciting opportunities.

Alex Efthymiou, senior front end developer, Rippleffect