Book Image

Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3 Essentials

By : Alex Libby, Gaurav Gupta, Asoj Talesra
Book Image

Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3 Essentials

By: Alex Libby, Gaurav Gupta, Asoj Talesra

Overview of this book

Responsive web design (RWD) is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing and interaction experience—providing easy reading and navigation with minimum resizing, panning, and scrolling—and all of this across a wide range of devices from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones. Responsive web design is becoming more important as the amount of mobile traffic now accounts for more than half of the Internet’s total traffic. This book will give you in depth knowledge about the basics of responsive web design. You will embark on a journey of building effective responsive web pages that work across a range of devices, from mobile phones to smart TVs, with nothing more than standard markup and styling techniques. You'll begin by getting an understanding of what RWD is and its significance to the modern web. Building on the basics, you'll learn about layouts and media queries. Following this, we’ll dive into creating layouts using grid based templates. We’ll also cover the important topic of performance management, and discover how to tackle cross-browser challenges.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3 Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Setting the available viewport for use


When viewing a website on different devices, we of course expect it to resize to the available device width automatically with no loss of experience; unfortunately, not every site does this quite the right way or successfully!

To understand why this is important, let's assume we operate a desktop version of our site (one in the 1280+ group in this screenshot), and a mobile equivalent from the 418-768 group:

The first stage in making our site responsive is to add the viewport directive; without it, we are likely to end up with a similar effect to this when resizing our sites:

See what I mean? It looks awful—text is cut off, we would have to swipe to the right...ugh! In stark contrast, adding one line of code can have a dramatic effect:

Our example uses the Google Chrome set to emulate an iPhone 6 Plus. The code needed to restore sanity to our example can be added to the <head> of our code:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,...