Quote Originally Posted by hseiken View Post
'Responsive design' is quite silly as a concept.
Err.. no! Absolutely not!

At what point is someone going to literally load up a website on a pc then suddenly shoot it over their cell phone? You're really designing two sites and of those two sites, you'll be doing two different things.
Err.. yes! Absolutely!

So how can you be wrong, completely wrong and then right?

First of all responsive websites adapt to the width they have available. The elements making up the website will adapt their widths according to the size of the container in which they fit. Some of those elements may have a fixed size or be a fixed ratio. So if a user resizes the browser, typically the text in a text box will reflow to adjust to the size available. The page height may get longer or shorter. It's not WYSIWYG. In Xara the adaptive approach means the text size is fixed and will not reflow because the page is a fixed size.

Now imagine a design that had a text box with a long passage of text that occupied the page width. That would look great on a mobile phone in portrait orientation. It would look terrible on a desktop with great long lines of text - very hard to read.

Some HTML frameworks control the layout. So a desktop design with four horizontal elements would present them stacked one on top of another in a mobile design and if they were text, they would fill the available width.

So responsive design can work superbly within a framework and with some control over minimum width etc.

Not only do responsive designs adapt to the width of the browser, they don't used fixed positioning like Xara, so they adapt to the width and the elements flow.

Now to your second point, which is really the reason for your opening comment..

As you say a mobile design should not incorporate the same elements as a desktop version - I agree completely. Xara makes this possible by using variants to switch fixed size designs according to the browser width. Fine.

What I think you are missing is that responsive designs can do exactly the same! Responsive designs do that by switching designs in exactly the same way Xara does by using media queries to present different responsive page designs according to page width breakpoints.

https://www.w3schools.com/css/css_rwd_mediaqueries.asp

So I hope you'll change your mind about the evil of responsive design. It's not one design suits all devices.

[ I have no clue about the rest of your rant! Made no sense to me. ]