I’m all in favour of responsive design for one reason more than anything else: I hate zooming in on squinty text on my phone. Most sites have a small enough body font combined with a long enough measure that even when zoomed in on the content column, I have to turn my 480*800 pixel screen to landscape just to be able to read it. Responsive design neatly solves the problem of the vast number of devices and resolutions which are used to consume the modern Web (if you need to get up to date on it, I can heartily recommend Ethan Marcotte‘s book: Responsive Web Design).
The attention of the Web community has now turned to the scaling of images, and how to serve up bandwidth-optimised versions of each image, appropriate to the scale and context at which they’ll be displayed. Heads have been scratched and solutions have been proposed, but for better or worse, they’re all hacks to some degree. Most (if not all) of these techniques are formulated under the assumption that they’ll be implemented by designers and front-end developers who understand the nuances of the markup they’re writing. How much markup is written by people who don’t know or care about responsive design, or generated by a CMS?
I can only speak from my own experience, but to me there’s little to no value to a client in a static HTML brochure site any more. Producing static HTML puts the client at the mercy of the designer when they need to make changes, and producing a WordPress theme (for example) is scarcely more labour-intensive than a static design of the same number of pages as WP templates. So here we have the case where the client may be adding content to their new responsive site, and this is where we run into the problem with the raft of responsive image techniques currently available: they all require specific changes (some more semantic than others) to the format of the markup – none of them are a transparent solution that can be dropped into place and work with a simple <img> element, such as those inserted in Content Management Systems by people who don’t write HTML.
I’ve done a lot of thinking myself on the subject. I don’t pretend to be able to solve problems that our best and brightest have to date failed to solve, but I’ve come to a somewhat surprising conclusion: I don’t care about responsive images, at least not for the moment. There’s an old joke that goes something like this:
Two campers are walking through the forest when they encounter a grizzly bear, which rears up on its hind legs and lets out a terrifying roar. Both campers are frozen in their tracks. The first camper whispers, “I’m glad I wore my running shoes today.”
“It doesn’t matter what kind of shoes you’re wearing, you’re not gonna outrun that bear,” replies the second.
“I don’t have to outrun the bear,” the first camper replies, “I just have to outrun you.”
We’ve all been trying to come up with more and more elaborate ways to outrun the bear, when by dint of adapting to screen size and orientation, our responsive designs will easily outpace the more pedestrian fixed-width sites that currently make up the vast majority of a user’s experience. (I’m aware of the irony that this site is not, at time of writing, responsive. I’m working on it.)
