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

Understanding the mechanics of grid layouts


So far, we explored one of the key critical elements of responsive design, in the form of how we would set our available screen estate (or viewport)—as someone once said, it's time...

Absolutely—it's time we cracked on and explored how grids operate! The trick behind grids is nothing special; it boils down to the use of a single formula to help define the proportions of each element used in our layouts:

target ÷ context = result

Let's imagine that we have a layout with two columns, and that the container (or context) is 960px wide (I will use pixel values purely to illustrate the maths involved).

To create our layout, we will make use of the Golden Ratio that we touched on in Chapter 1, Introducing Responsive Web Design; to recap, we use the ratio of 1.618 to every 1 pixel. So, if our layout is 960px wide, we multiply 960 x 0.618 (the difference)—this gives 593px (rounded down to the nearest integer). We then simply subtract 593 from 960, to arrive...