Okay, we've covered enough general background; time to get more practical!
There are many tools available to help us, when constructing responsive sites; this of course includes tools such as JavaScript or jQuery, but also plugins such as FitVids (to manage videos, responsively) or ResponsiveSlides for creating responsive carousels.
However, we're not going to use any of them. All we need is a text editor and a browser, and nothing more! We're not going to download anything as part of completing the exercises in this book.
Yes, I hear those exclamations of incredulity. I must have lost my marbles, I hear you say. There is a very good reason for this approach though; let me explain:
On too many occasions, I see instances where we simply reach for the latest plugin to help us achieve a result. Ordinarily, there is nothing wrong with this; after all, time pressures frequently mean that we can't afford the time to take a more considered approach.
However, I believe we've become lazy. There is no need for many of the tools that are available, when building responsive sites. It's time to go back to basics; throughout the course of this book, we're going to prove that we can build the basics of responsive functionality, with nothing more than a simple text editor and a browser for viewing.
There are some caveats to this approach though, that we should bear in mind:
Much of what we construct won't work in some older browsers—IE9 or below is a good case in point. The question you must ask yourself is: how many people use this for your site? If the percentage is very low, then you can consider dropping them; if not, then you will need to seek a different approach.
Concentrating on using just HTML and CSS does not mean that we're rejecting other tools outright; if we need to use them, then we need to use them. The question we must ask ourselves though is this: do we really need to use them? Or are we just too lazy to go old school and create things from the ground up?
With that aside, there are a couple of administration tasks we need to complete first; we need a project area to store our content. I would recommend creating a folder somewhere on your PC or Mac to store files; I will for the purposes of this book assume you've called it B03568, and that it is stored on the C: drive. If you've stored it somewhere else, then adjust accordingly.
Next up, we will need a copy of the code download that accompanies this book—there will be instances where we won't cover some of the more mundane content, but focus on the really important content; we can get those less critical files from the code download.
Finally, do you have a text editor that you like using? If not, then you might like to look at Sublime Text 3; it is our preferred editor of choice. The real benefit of using it means we can add plugins, such as the REM-PX (available from https://packagecontrol.io/packages/REM%20PX), which is perfect for converting from pixel to rem-based values! (We will cover this more in later chapters).
Okay, onwards we go; the next stage in our journey is to consider a suitable strategy for creating our responsive sites. There is nothing outrageously complex about this, it is more about making some sensible choices as to what approach we should use which bests fit our solution. Let's take a moment to explore what this means in practice.