Book Image

RESS Essentials

Book Image

RESS Essentials

Overview of this book

RESS is a new methodology in the world of web design and development. It attempts to solve the problems that accompany the RWD (responsive web design) approach to web design. RESS is still in its infancy, but it is growing at an exponential rate. RESS Essentials shows you how to make server-side applications smarter and more aware of a visitor's environment limitations (device, screen size, and browser). This allows you to create faster and more reliable websites. Through this book, you will build a solid base of knowledge on RESS-related technologies, while the step-by-step tutorials will help you to create your own RESS system. This book is an introduction to RESS alchemy and gives you an incentive to build your own RESS lab. It will give you a broad overview of the multiple techniques used to code responsive websites in responsible ways. Beginning with an overview of RWD, you will learn the steps involved in setting up RWD for client-side development. You will then learn how to scale images using client- and server-side technology. By the end of this book, you will have learned about the implementation of RESS application patterns, browser feature detection, and various RESS architectures. RESS Essentials will also teach you how to use jQuery with some RWD design patterns and how to employ REST API for RWD pages.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
RESS Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

YABFDL – Detector


Detector or "yet another browser and feature- detection library" by Dave Olsen, available at https://github.com/dmolsen/Detector, represents quite a different approach to the same problem. Instead of relying on centrally updated, database-binding UA strings to device capabilities, it uses JavaScript feature detection, stores collected information in the session variable, and saves it to the local cache. The most important features include:

  • Combining Server Side and Client Side browser-feature detection

  • A free, open, and very permissive license

  • Automatically updates the device list upon unknown device visit

  • The Detector relies on the JavaScript modernizr.js

Detector is in the Beta version and is not updated very often but is worth attention, especially when your target devices are JavaScript capable. The 5477 User Agent (UA) profiles registered by Detector until today seem modest in comparison to the 1,200,000 UA profiles in the 51degrees database (http://51degrees.mobi; 51degrees...