Transformations are a powerful technique for separating content and presentation in Web applications. Yet, they transformations have failed to gain popularity through XSLT. For this reason, Web developers are liable to think that transformations “don’t apply to me,” even though they work with HTML. Thankfully, new transformation frameworks are on the horizon, that hold the promise of a revival. In this article, Ishan Anand will reintroduce transformations and explore their applications to mobile and responsive design.
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One of the hardest problems in responsive Web design right now are responsive images. “Retina” images are especially a challenge because if you have sized your layout with ems or percentages, then you cannot be sure of the exact pixel dimensions of each image being displayed. In this article, Gavyn McKenzie will look at one solution to the problem that he implemented on his portfolio website at Etch.
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Imagine how your excitement after posting a blog and seeing so many visitors talking about it, turns to dismay as they start to tweet that your website is down — a database connection error is shown. Many of these mobile users access the Web via slow data connections and crowded public Wi-Fi. So, anything you can do to ensure that your website loads quickly will benefit those users. In this article, Rachel Andrew will show you Varnish Web application accelerator, a free and simple thing that makes a world of difference when a lot of people land on your website all at once.
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The best thing any designer can do is to collect feedback from real users. Recently, Joshua Gross had an opportunity to experience thiswhen iterating on HelloSign. Thanks to testing, the app went from four stars to a solid five stars after a redesign. You’ll look at how the app started, how they ran the tests and how the product ended up with five stars.
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In this article, Bryson Meunier would like to audit the US version of Disney Junior. He has chosen this website for three reasons: it’s not run by a client or a partner; it exhibits a lot of the SEO issues of many responsive websites; and his two and four year olds are huge fans of the brand and often use my smartphone or our family iPad to visit it. This audit of Disney’s beautiful but often frustrating website shows that mobile SEO doesn’t end once you’ve made a website responsive, and it gives Disney a framework to make its website more usable and findable on search engines.
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Much of that page weight could be reduced if images were conditionally optimized based on device width, pixel density and modern image formats. These reductions would result in faster loading times, but the debate isn’t about whether to optimize images for different devices, but about how to go about doing so. In this article, Shawn Jansepar will take a look at Mobify.js, which lets us generate small images for small devices from a single high-resolution image.
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In this article Ronan Cremin explains how to use RESS (responsive design with server-side components) to make significant performance and reach improvements to a website for both mobile and desktop devices alike. Your website will change from one that works on desktops, tablets and smartphones to one that works on almost anything anywhere and loads faster in all cases. It’s hard to over-emphasize the importance of this, but if you need a good case study, read about what happened to YouTube when Google lightened its pages…
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The dream of a “magical” image format that will solve the responsive images problem lives on. Yoav Weiss started wondering if such an image format could be used to solve both the art direction and resolution-switching use cases. So he created a prototype to prove its feasibility. The prototype is now available, ready to be tinkered with. In this post, Yoav explains what this prototype does, what it cannot do, how it works, and its advantages and disadvantages relative to markup solutions.
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Responsive design for images is about optimizing the process of serving images to users. In this article, Anders Andersen & Tobias Järlund will share their responsive image technique, the “padding-bottom” technique, which they researched and implemented on the mobile version of the Swedish news website Aftonbladet (Sweden’s largest website). The technique presented here applies to all types of responsive websites.
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Over the past few months Jon Rundle has been involved in launching two large institutional websites with complex navigation systems on which maintaining simplicity becomes increasingly difficult as content requirements grow and tiers of navigation are added. In this article, Jon will illustrate the techniques involved in implementing responsive navigation on a large website.
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