I was wondering if anyone knows of any large sites that use progressive enhancement/CSS3?
I am trying to put a case together at work on why sites don't need to be a carbon copy in all browsers but my arguements will be somewhat impotent without examples in the wild.
http://www.headscape.co.uk/ use CSS3 properties while ensuring that their website degrades nicely in browsers that don't support CSS3.
http://www.piccsy.com/everything-design/
http://www.soleilnoir.net/believein/
sites use CSS3 transitions but they work fine in IE too apart from the smooth transitioning effects.Comprehensive fallbacks can be written in place for CSS3 properties.
For animation effects that use jQuery libraries animation enhancement plugin are advised.
Many major sites though use advanced properties will write comprehensive fallbacks in javascript so that the incompatible browsers will render the same effect but this can be detected when only one views the source code.
Related
I know HTML and CSS really well but responsive and continually messing around with css media queries is just a pain in the butt. What do you recommend to make my workflow of making my sites responsive less cumbersome? What can I learn to make my job easier?
I see some sites out there where the responsiveness is so dynamic and perfect. CSS media queries don't seem to create this fluidity.
http://getbootstrap.com/getting-started/
Bootstrap is compatible with the latest versions of all major browsers. It gracefully degrades when used on older browsers such as Internet Explorer 8.
Since version 2.0 it also supports responsive web design. This means the layout of web pages adjusts dynamically, taking into account the characteristics of the device used (desktop, tablet, mobile phone).
Starting with version 3.0, Bootstrap adopted a mobile first design philosophy, emphasizing responsive design by default.
Bootstrap is open source and available on GitHub. Developers are encouraged to participate in the project and make their own contributions to the platform.
Recently, community members have translated Bootstrap's documentation into various languages, including Chinese, Spanish and Russian.[6]
I am trying to convert my current website to a mobile version. I will be creating different views (I am using codeigniter) but want to make sure the CSS will look perfect on all phones. What are the universal/standard specs for a mobile website?
Also, what language is recommended? I was thinking just changing the CSS to a specific width and redesigning according to that width.
As there is no fixed limit of screen width/height of mobile devices. You must consider using percentage value for sizes. That way your mobile site will be more compatible.
For info on effective mobile websites, ie, what you should include and what not. Take a look here
http://www.qsrweb.com/article/202567/3-tips-for-creating-an-effective-mobile-website
For width related queries, see this,
Mobile version of my website, what design width is optimal?
A quick google search yields the following:
W3C's thoughts: http://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/mobilweb.html
Smashing Magazine's thoughts (I have enjoyed some of their comparison articles before): http://www.smashingmagazine.com/guidelines-for-mobile-web-development/
You will want your page to be easy on the fingers, keep the text displayed to a minimum at first (i.e. summary + expanding things), and overall run fast. You will probably want to have multiple levels of fallback on things like CSS so that people running a CSS 1/2 browser can still use the website, even though CSS3 browsers may have a better experience.
Your site could also make use of media queries to choose a stylesheet based on the size of the user's screen (there are several standard sizes, especially if you consider the popular devices).
Javascript and other things like that should also work well for fallbacks. Using things like HTML5 canvases and WebSockets and such are good since they can be assisted directly by the mobile device hardware, but your script should handle those things not being available as well.
And, as always, an easy to navigate page goes a long ways just as it does with normal development. If the user can tell just by looking at the page how to use it intuitively (remember, intuitive for you isn't always the same as someone else), then I would think you are on the right track.
There are many takes on designing sites for mobile devices. The most straightforward, is to build an entirely separate user interface, just for the mobile site.
The next method would be to use CSS media-queries. This allows you to re-use your current UI and styling, but you can tailor it's content to specific widths and devices.
Lastly, is fully responsive design. It's rather similar to media queries, except that it uses percentages, instead of absolute pixels. It's the most seamless way, that a standard width-webpage can scale to fit the screen of a smaller mobile device. It can even scale up easily!
Here's a good place to start learning about responsive web design, and how it applies to mobile devices - http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/12/guidelines-for-responsive-web-design/
Try scaling the size of your browser while on that site. Notice how the layout changes. That's CSS media queries at work.
I'm a big fan of Zurb Foundation. They just released Zurb Foundation 4 which was redesigned to be mobile first. I'm fairly new to responsive design taking into account both mobile, tablet, and traditional desktop experiences. I'm trying to wrap my head around how best to manage my site's content for these different devices. With Zurb Foundation 4, you can hide or show content based on small, medium, or large device sizes. So, it seems with Zurb's approach you drop all of the content down to the device and let the CSS decide what content to show depending on device (this is responsive design).
My question is why do we have to drop all of the content to the device? That seems like a waste of processing on the server, a waste of bandwidth, a slower experience as the browser handles the content some of which may never be shown to the user because of the device they are using. Am I missing something? Wouldn't it be better to go back to the server and let it send content to the client that's appropriate for the device type? Shouldn't we be concerned about mobile user's data plans and not send down content that's not appropriate for their device type? All the examples that I've seen on responsive design has content for desktop and mobile/tablet downloaded to the client which seems to be a waste.
I'm developing a time entry application that has a different user experience based on the device type. Desktops (when in full screen) have a more detailed data entry experience whereas mobile/tablets have a different experience because of device real estate is smaller. I'm developing the app so when the desktop browser is resized to something smaller that 768px wide that jQuery makes a call to the server to swap out the UI for the "smaller" mobile/tablet version. Is this appropriate? I certainly do not want to download 2 versions of the app and hide one or the other depending on the device width.
Am I on the right track with my jQuery approach? Am I missing something regarding responsive design and needing to tailor the content to the device? Any ideas, suggestions, and guidance is appreciated. Thanks.
Mobile First with Zurb Foundation is basically a philosophy change by the Zurb team and if you want do develop a responsive site and not take a Mobile First approach then I suggest using Foundation 3 which is still available and fantastic. There is a book that I am reading that gives a great pitch for Mobile First, called Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski who is also listed as an adviser to Zurb.
here is an article by the same author that might be interesting:
http://www.netmagazine.com/interviews/luke-wroblewski-mobile-first
Basically: the premise is that you start your development and design for a mobile, meaning basically an iOS or Android style browser and then add features.
So instead of starting with a desktop / tablet experience and removing things as was commonly done with .hide classes in foundation 3 and could still be implemented in this way with foundation 4, they suggest using .show classes to add additional content.
This can be taken way further by using Compass and Sass Mixins. There isn't a lot of great documentation on how to do this, but you can basically keep your markup semantic, apply an id rather than a class and use the mixins to apply it to that id. There are advantages here in speed traversing the dom for an id vs. a class so it can be a good way to go.
Note: foundation 4 is using the drop in replacement (there are some limitations) for jQuery called Zepto. You can replace Zepto with jQuery if you really need it in foundation 4 or use foundation 3 instead. Zepto is much more lightweight and thus suited well for mobile.
As for it being faster by using jQuery to async load the data (I am assuming) based on the size of the browser, that is one way to do it. I am not sure if you are going to have a huge speed increase here. There are many strategies, pagination, async loading more data on the fly, and it depends on how you arrange the UX / UI around that data.
There are also many other issues such as caching resources, CDN, etc. that are typical in front end engineering that might give a faster load time. One resource you can check out related to this is ySlow.
There are also many design patterns such as off canvas slides, the 3 line (hamburger menu), loading more data on scroll, stateless apps, that can allow you to have the same functionality in a mobile app. If you go stateless, after the initial page load other pages should appear to be almost instantaneous.
I think the question here is more philosophical, in do you need all of the features, which is one thing that I believe taking a Mobile First approach is trying to approach.
Another thing to think about is the perceived loading time. I think I read about this is Seductive UX (another great read) but the faster you can get the page up with a loader or spinner, the faster it is perceived to be loading, even when in actuality it can be loading slower.
As a final note, if you plan on using foundation, you might look into using jQuery/Zepto with Modernizr to pull from the same media queries foundation is using. That way you don't duplicate or create something that is inconsistent with the rest of the responsiveness.
I'm developing the app so when the desktop browser is resized to something smaller that 768px wide that jQuery makes a call to the server to swap out the UI for the "smaller" mobile/tablet version. Is this appropriate?
It doesn't sound like a good approach do you take orientationChange in to account?
I certainly do not want to download 2 versions of the app and hide one or the other depending on the device width.
If you are on most tablets visiting the website in portrait and change to landscape you'll have to download the >768px UI after already downloading the <768px UI.
The mobile first approach in zb4 (with media queries) allow you to prevent stuff that belongs to big devices to be downloaded in to small devices. Basically you start with mobile styles and if the device meets the conditions you set on your mediaqueries (you can have much more breakpoints than the zf4 framework gives you by default) then the next rule jumps in.
I have worked in several 'responsive' projects even back in the pre-mediaqueries days were I use javascript to measure windowsize
Regarding javascript and like #powjames3 said zepto is much lighter / faster than jquery and if you could write your own javacript functions will be much better than using a over-bloated library.
Nowadays I do mobileFirst responsive webapps and websites use a mix of user agent sniffing ( sometimes to decide what image src or script / style src to deliver), despite the decision of the user agent tests i always serve mobile first mediaqueries, and conditionally loaded content.
"As Ethan Marcote (and John Allsopp before him), were right to point out, the inherent flexibility of the web is a feature, not a bug."
Here are some resources that might put you in the right track:
User agent parse and detection:http://mobiledetect.net/
Tutorial http://www.html5rocks.com/en/mobile/responsivedesign/ that covers:
Why we need to create mobile-first, responsive, adaptive experiences
How to structure HTML for an adaptive site in order to optimize performance and - prioritize flexibility
How to write CSS that defines shared styles first, builds up styles for larger screens with media queries, and uses relative units
How to write unobtrusive Javascript to conditionally load in content fragments, take advantage of touch events and geolocation
What we could do to further enhance our adaptive experience
Hope it helps
I have heard that EXTJS is a browser independent javascript library. How does extjs make itself browser independent? When I open up the library classes, I do not see any code like :
if (IE)//do this;
else if (FF) // do something else;
Is my understanding correct that extjs is browser independent?
In addition to sha's point, I'm aware that ExtJS uses conditional checks for browser features and selects whether to use things like images, or css for particular visual effects.
Two examples of this would be that it manages to produce rounded corners on it's widgets in IE6 via images, but in anything which supports it, it will use 'border-radius' in CSS.
This is also true with gradients in widgets, which are rendered as images in older browsers, but use CSS3 gradients where supported.
As a rule, from what I've seen, ExtJS uses 'feature detection' to work out what your current browser supports and responds appropriately. A further example of this would be it's charting classes, which render as SVG if supported, or VML on older browsers.
There are some classes in ExtJS you can use to perform feature detection if you wish to do anything specific outside of it's in built in actions too. I'd imagine it uses these under the hood to make decisions about what to render.
That aside, it should be noted that every now and again, you can notice odd discrepancies between browser versions, usually annoying little visual effects, like a scrollbar being present in one browser an not in another, this could however just be a symptom of other code, but I know we've seen a few little quirks from time to time when testing accross IE8, IE9 and Chrome for example.
It is browser independent. As far as I know they have some different CSS definitions for different browsers. If you want to see is there any difference in the JS code you will have to look deeper - probably at some ExtJs core files.
We've been using it so far on IE, FF, Chrome, Safari, Mobile Safari etc.
I'm trying to determine what kinds of interactions a mobile website can handle. For example, I obviously can't track page-level dragging operations because this scrolls on mobile browsers. So, I'm looking for demos that can tell me what interactions work, how well, and hopefully for information about how consistently that is across mobile devices. For example, I'd like to know if I had a page that fit on the screen, would my page elements receive mouse move events when I drag my finger? I could test that myself, but I figure there are probably lots of things that could be tested, so I was hoping there was something like the ACID test, but for mobile UI interactions.
I don't think I've ever seen such a thing, but the thing to remember is the browser is just one key factor in the interaction between your application and the user. The capabilities of the device itself is a large part of what you can and cannot do. For one, the iPhone has a full JavaScript stack and CSS rendering ability as well as the ability to "click". However, on a BlackBerry you're going to lose a lot of that CSS and JavaScript functionality. Also, with Nokia handsets you're going to be dealing with a different beast. The best way to develop for something like this would be to either use a framework/device template like the ASP.NET Mobile platform, or to go as close to basic HTML as you can.
There is no silver bullet, and you're just going to have to try to cover as much market share as you can. One thing I can share, is that the more standards compliant and semantic your markup, the better it will render across the devices. Sometimes, you can even get away with just coding the site once provided your site degrades well when CSS and JS are not available.