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

Dave Olsen's Detector


The Detector library is an attempt to make device detection libraries based on the analysis of UA strings obsolete. The problem with this is that it needs to send the test page to a browser that supports JavaScript and has it turned on. In order to speed up the page loading, it employs the following two mechanisms:

  • Using the server cache of UA string footprints (which ironically makes it, in a way, a UA string analysis library)

  • Storing client information in both a session variable and a cookie

The following figure illustrates information flow between the Detector and the browser. The HTTP request drawn on the left side represents the first and each consecutive "regular" request. The one drawn on the right side is sent from the test page and may occur as a second request when none of the conditions in the center of the figure is met. In other words when the user requests any page on the website, Detector tries to determine the following:

  • If cookies and JavaScript are supported...