This article first appeared in issue 235 of .net magazine – the world's best-selling magazine for web designers and developers.
Not long into the current millennium, design for the web was in transition. The methods and techniques we had used to make our first mark on this new communications medium were becoming staid and unsustainable. New possibilities in separating content from the presentation layer were permeating their way into the industry, and cascading style sheets were the way forward for the responsible designer. Adoption was neither universal nor instantaneous. There was resistance, confusion and some very vocal debate throughout the design community.
From the haze came Dave Shea’s CSS Zen Garden. The site, if you don’t know it, accepts CSS submissions and applies them to a core HTML file, demonstrating how separating content from its presentation facilitates a beautiful, effective flexibility. In 2003 it marked a sea change. It enlightened many designers, including me, and put the argument for the jump to CSS beyond debate.
We are in similarly epochal times today. Technology, hardware and software combined have presented us with another fork in the road for online design. The flagship approach to these new challenges has an official name: responsive web design, a term that packages up a collection of techniques. A banner of convenience it may be, but it at least suggests a direction. Its greatest achievement has been coalescing the design community in a way that links circulated on Twitter or hundreds of disparate, fragmented blog posts – no matter how insightful – do not. RWD offers a sense of unity.
There are a number of other, less celebrated concepts in circulation that are often confused as interchangeable with RWD: future friendly. One web. Content out. Number wang.
The smoke signals coming out of the industry simply add to an air of confusion; strangely, it’s a topic that sets designers at odds. I say strangely, because any forward-thinking designer must see the accommodation of multi-device access as a necessity. In that sense I am an advocate of RWD. And yet I am also wary of sliding towards a ‘the answer’s RWD, now what’s the question’ stance.
