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Ask HN: Why is a website being "responsive" good?

6 points by mcartyem ↗ HN
Why must website elements resize magically when windows are enlarged?

People read best when they don't move their head left and right. This means 80 characters in a line. Why must CSS frameworks have support for being "responsive"?

Why is responsive good?

10 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 24.3 ms ] thread
arkitaip
The real reason? Because making sure that your web site has a browser AND mobile AND app version is too expensive. So most sites settle for a crappy responsive version that pisses everyone off to some degree.
mcartyem
Why does your web site need to have all those versions?

Why can't you have only one version, and someone on mobile will zoom in and out?

A web site version with 10 things on the header is going to piss people off on the mobile app regardless of how responsively those 10 things show up in their face. A better thing to do is to not show any of those crappy 10 things to begin with.

thekevan
>Why can't you have only one version, and someone on mobile will zoom in and out?

Because to do that manually is usually clunky. Responsiveness makes it happen automatically and thus smooth.

>A web site version with 10 things on the header is going to piss people off on the mobile app regardless of how responsively those 10 things show up in their face.

Good responsive sites rearrange those 10 things in the header so that they are not "in your face" as you say. See also: Twitter Bootstrap.

[dead] joeycfan
Because computers are about instant gratification and always will be.
Xrpde
Having two separate websites is bad for user experience no matter how you look at it. I approach it to having a flash website and an html one. Same concept. Plus mobile detection is not future proof.
mcartyem
Why is it bad for user experience?
EnderMB
Why? If a user interacts with a site differently on mobile than on their desktop machine then two separate interfaces is good? That's not just good "UX", it's good logic.

The main argument I see against separate "views" is that it's an expensive exercise to effectively build two frontends for a single site. However, as someone who has built both large-scale responsive and mobile-specific sites neither is really cheaper.

[dead] robwgibbons
Because you only need to build one page, and it looks how you want on any device. You no longer need to build separate templates and forward using server-side browser sniffing.
jdietrich
You've misunderstood what "responsive" means.

Text growing to fill the width of the page is the default mode of the web. The ability to control the width of text came much later. What has only recently become practical - and what people mean by "responsive" or "fluid" layout - is the ability to intelligently reformat the page to suit the available container, by for instance using a layout that can grow from a single column to five or six columns depending on the container width, or by removing or simplifying certain navigation elements in very small containers.

Designing around a fixed layout is a very bad idea. Viewers with smaller than anticipated containers will have to scroll horizontally and users of wider than anticipated containers will be frustrated by large areas of whitespace. Your layout is liable to break completely if a user is substantially altering your page layout, for reasons of accessibility or convenience.

Responsiveness is about designing sites that are maximally readable and usable on all devices; When done well, sites will effortlessly adapt to new devices and new form-factors.