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 different layout types


A problem that has faced web designers for some years is the type of layout their site should use—should it be fluid, fixed width, have the benefits of being elastic, or a hybrid version that draws on the benefits of a mix of these layouts?

The type of layout we choose to use will of course depend on client requirements—making it a fluid layout means we are effectively one step closer to making it responsive; the difference being that the latter uses media queries to allow resizing of content for different devices, not just normal desktops!

To understand the differences, and how responsive layouts compare, let's take a quick look at each in turn:

  • Fixed width layouts: These are constrained to a fixed width; a good size is around 960px, as this can be split equally into columns, with no remainder. The downside is fixed width makes assumptions about the available viewport area, and if the screen is too small or large, it results in lots of scrolling which...