I am currently reading ‘Responsive Web Design’ by Ethan Marcotte from the ‘a book apart’ series to further my knowledge in this area. The number of devices and browsers that we need to design and build for is continually growing and this book brilliantly explains how we can approach targeting them all. Having known a little on the subject of media queries, this book was a good choice for expanding my knowledge but would be equally useful to a novice front-end developer.

Now although I think this book is great at simplifying quite a complex subject, there were a few annoyances I had. Throughout the lines of explanatory code, (and there is a lot,) the author seemed to avoid using css3 selectors, in what is clearly a css3 subject. Whereas this could have been a deliberate attempt to not confuse the beginner, it felt a little bit sloppy. For example, the author added an ID to each navigational item as css hooks where he should have used pseudo classes e.g nth-child(even).

Another example of outdated code was the authors use of the <b> and <i> tags to wrap an image. He explained his reasoning was a preference for one letter tags but the problem is these have semantic meaning and default styling as well. Therefore a <span> or <div> would have been more appropriate as a css hook here.

Reading this book has encouraged our front-end team to think about standardizing our approach to responsive development. Going forward we will include media queries inside our default stylesheet so as to reduce the number of browser requests and make for more logical reading.

So although I couldn’t help pulling apart the code in places I think this book demonstrates how we can respond to the user’s needs no matter how they are choosing to view a site. And all In just 150 pages.