Will the Browser Wars Invade the Mobile Web? Editor’s note: The opinions expressed in this article are solely that of the author’s, Arley McBlain. When it comes to the still emerging Mobile Web realm, I think we should all be outraged about the trouble Windows Phone 7.5 can unleash. Like anyone, I was curious what Windows Phone 7.5 (codenamed Mango) — a software update to Microsoft’s mobile device operating system — would bring to the Mobile Web front.
I’m a web designer, so things like this can affect me professionally. My real interest in Mango lies in its web browser, IE Mobile 9. How would it hold up? A Bit of Background Until recently, there were arguably only three major players in the mobile device world: BlackBerry, iPhone and Android. Source: Wikipedia Four years. Mango is now released with IE9 adapted to their mobile OS (called IE Mobile 9). Why It Matters It seems as though the Mobile space is beginning to repeat what we have seen from the ongoing desktop browser wars. When IE6 was king, it had over 75% of market share. Overflow Image with vertical centering for Responsive Web Design. If you want to use an image in your responsive web design you can use fluid images. But there is another way.
You can set a maximum height and crop the image. So how does this work? It's simple. Just put your image in a container and set the width of your image to 100%. If you now change the width of the container, you will see that the image adapts the container's width but does not exceed the max-height. Now you have a cropped image that adapts the width of your container. To do this you can use JavaScript (jQuery). Margin-top = (container height - image height) / 2 Then call a JavaScript function on the events load, resize and here comes the special: "transitionend". So just use a CSS transition to change the max-width and you can fire the callback function when the transition ends.
You can use a CSS transition for the margin-top of the image to make it smooth. That's it. PS: It would be great to see a solution for this technique with CSS only. Responsive Image Hierarchy - Dave Rupert. Image Height == Image Importance. November 18, 2011 • Reading Time: 03:02 In a single column “mobile view”, taller images appear more important than wider images. We came across this unexpected maxim while working on a recent responsive design. Our design employed a ~3:1 hero image with three ~4:3 thumbs below it. At full width it was the proper hierarchy: Biggest == Most Important. However, when resized and folded into a single column, the 3:1 image appears to be about ½ the height of the 4:3 images below it.
Narrow your browser width to see the visual hierarchy breakdown: View “BEFORE” Pretty unacceptable to lose hierarchy on such a major feature of the site - especially when e-commerce and products are involved. Uncle Dave’s Squeeze n’ Crop Method We wanted stop the image from scaling once it reached a certain height. First wrap the image in a DIV, this will act as an image-mask of sorts. The image hugs the left of the wrapper. Results View “AFTER” Techniques in responsive web design. We’ve talked a lot about responsive design here on Webdesigner Depot, and shared a lot of valuable resources. Today we’re sharing another valuable resource: at the end of this article are details for getting a discount on Chris Converse’s responsive design course on MightyDeals. CSS3 media queries allow us to dynamically alter the design and layout of a web page in order to deliver an optimal user experience from a single set of HTML and CSS markup. The techniques in this article explain how we can leverage this powerful capability of CSS to also change imagery, alter the navigation on hand-held devices, and set up default CSS for compatibility older browsers.
Creating different images When altering your design for different devices, consider creating multiple versions of your graphics. This can greatly affect the speed at which your design loads on smaller screens, and gives you the opportunity to customize each version of your graphic. Assign images to HTML elements . Responsive Web Design Templates and Frameworks. Eventually, we’ll all stop talking about responsive web design – not because it will go away, but because it will become what’s expected. Flashback ten years ago and we were all talking about CSS and tableless design, but today there’s no need to mention it. It’s simply the way modern websites are built, although sadly, I’m sure there’s a few out there still using tables. Nevertheless, the concept of responsive web design is still relatively new.
So it’s our job to help you learn about it and to help you find the stuff that makes building responsive sites easier. For this post we’ve gathered a collection of Responsive Web Design Templates and Frameworks. Mobile Boilerplate Mobile Boilerplate is your trusted template made custom for creating rich and performant mobile web apps. Skeleton Skeleton is a small collection of CSS & JS files that can help you rapidly develop sites that look beautiful at any size, be it a 17″ laptop screen or an iPhone. Hardboiled CSS3 Media Queries tiny fluid grid. 8 Popular online apps to test the mobile version of your site. The mobile revolution has inspired major and minor websites alike to have a mobile version. Mobile versions can be created using themes, extensions, and other modifications. While developing mobile version, you may want to test it on two, three, or even five different mobile handsets. After development, you are not aware how it will appear in each mobile present on this Earth as you have to buy each of them to test it manually.
Let us make this work simple for you by collecting some tools in this article to test the mobile version of your website. You can test your mobile website on these tools, analyze it for the mistakes/errors, and then optimize it according to the recommendations. 1. W3C tops the list every time you come to the field of website testing. 2. Ready.Mobi is a service of dotMobi and an extension of W3C MobileOk Checker Service. 3. Google also has tools for testing your website for mobile. 4. iPad Peek Currently, Apple iPad is the highest selling tablet. 5. 6. 7. 8. Create a Responsive Web Design Template. Our favorite tweets of the week Oct 3-Oct 9, 2011 | Webdesigner Depot.
Tutorial by Matt Doyle | Level: Intermediate | Published on 30 September 2011 Categories: What exactly is responsive design, and how do you create a responsive website? This tutorial explains the concepts, and walks you through the basic steps for creating a responsive website layout. Responsive web design is a hot topic these days, especially as websites need to adapt to the growing number of mobile devices with their relatively small screens.
Many designers and developers want to create new websites with responsive layouts, or modify their existing sites to incorporate responsive elements. However, the whole topic can be somewhat bewildering at first glance. In this article, you get a gentle introduction to the world of responsive web design. Ready to explore the world of responsive design? Responsive design in a nutshell The basic idea of responsive web design is that a website should "respond" to the device it's being viewed on. The www.elated.com layout is fixed-width. Min-width: Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS. CSS, by its very nature, is used to lay elements out on the page. However, there is a distinction between layouts dictating the major and minor components of a page.
The minor components—such as a callout, or login form, or a navigation item—sit within the scope of major components such as a header or footer. I refer to the minor components as Modules and will dive into those in the next section. The major components are referred to as Layout styles. Layout styles can also be divided into major and minor styles based on reuse. Major layout styles such as header and footer are traditionally styled using ID selectors but take the time to think about the elements that are common across all components of the page and use class selectors where appropriate. Layout declarations Some sites may have a need for a more generalized layout framework (for example, 960.gs).
Generally, a Layout style only has a single selector: a single ID or class name. Using ID selectors Layout Examples.