responsive web design

[Big Frank]

since i stopped wondering what adobe was up to a long time ago maybe my very very rough and unpolished thought isn't so very very rough and unpolished after all

[xtom]

Sounds like a good approach having the pages side by side and have it export a screen size detection script automatically. You could possibly go a step further and have 3 or more pages side by side for various common screen sizes. Certainly seems like it would be much easier to implement than responsive design and it wouldn't jepordise how wysiwyg works at the moment as much as responsive design would. Although a mobile site doesn't nesecarrily have to have the same pages as a desktop site, so you might have a scenario where you have some pages dedicated to one or the other but not both, I guess you could ignore and leave them blank or put a page not found message on them that links to the mobile home page or desktop view. The biggest thing would probably be the page and layer gallery which would need to be able to support these new page types because sharing layers accross the desktop and mobile pages wouldn't work.

[Big Frank]

as always the biggest threat to such an evolution is screen clutter but the animation and frame gallery, the presentation toolbar are unavailable unless you're doing a animation/presentation and this could use the same convention, disabling certain screen elements, but what would be nice when you're doing this would be synchronised scrolling, synchronised selection of elements, with the ability ofc to disable

[pauland]

If you design for a mobile phone or tablet, your placement and content can be radically different, so synchronisation would work against this.

You may not even have some desktop elements on a mobile version.

[slavelle]

The "programming" (really mostly css rules) that makes the site responsive (assuming that you are using a natively responsive layout to begin with, such as Twitter Bootstrap or in the case of Joomla 3.x, that framework is built in - we use a framework on top of that structure called T3, which has a lot of the basic scaffolding done) is usually done with "overrides".

Once we design the desktop version, we then have options to determine at which of 5 resolution ranges each of the "modules" will appear on. This happens via the administrative backend of the site "template" (we use the "blank" one and build according to the design created in Xara DPX9). So I can specify for "wide", "normal", "xtablet", "tablet", and "mobile". I can also determine what resolution ranges apply to each of those, though the defaults are pretty accurate currently. Then, the main layout and css of the primary site cascade down to the responsive sizes so the primary elements are properly styled already. Then you override those styles according to needs. For example, I wold typically have left justified test on the left wide of the footer and right justified on the right side, and in desktop mode, this makes sense, but when you get down to mobile size, the module on the right side of the footer drops BELOW the one on the left side, so it looks odd on a mobile device. To override this, I create a rule at the mobile css file that specifies that the text in that module needs to be left justified instead. Then that is taken care of and otherwise automatically looks correct.

So - as you can see from that complexity, it really would be pretty hard to do in Xara as a Website creator directly, since it's not really 5 different designs, it's just rules to tell the main design how to behave. You COULD go extreme with this and have a completely different set of modules appear (using the unified content) at the mobile device level to hone in on just a few necessary parts - still better than a specifically mobile site because the content still comes from the same place, as do the other rules if needed.

We use Xara DPX9 to mock up the site, create and slice up the graphics, show previews to our clients with website export, etc and then code a custom Joomla! template to follow that design and act responsively.

Even Google is now saying "use a responsive site" to alleviate issues with duplicate content and deep-link to home page redirection - which they have stated will now actually penalize ecommerce sites.

It IS a lot of extra work, but a good selling point, but our typical customer who wants a "Xara site", which we will do in a budget case or for someone who doesn't care to update it themselves - ever, and has no need for a Blog (page size issues in Xara sites)...but we find that most of them, once hearing the explanation of the differences, opt for a few more bucks to do a Content Management System instead.

I hope this adds to the conversation without seeming argumentative - or stepping outside of the point of the web aspects of Xara.

[csehz]

We use Xara DPX9 to mock up the site, create and slice up the graphics, show previews to our clients with website export, etc and then code a custom Joomla! template to follow that design and act responsively.

Yes objectively Xara has around that place in responsive design