There’s recently been a lot of subversive talk at the coal face of the web design community about “responsive web design”. As far as we can tell the concept was first coined by “A List Apart” guru Ethan Marcotte and this has subsequently caused a raging debate in web design circles.
Essentially, the premise behind responsive web design is that websites should respond to the media on which they are viewed. Website layout, and perhaps also content, should be screen resolution aware and adapt accordingly. This all sounds very reasonable, so why is there a raging debate?
Well, this all suggests designers should no longer create specific, separate web sites for different media, but rather use the media query functionality in CSS3 (or other media/device detection methods) to create fluid layouts that adapt to different displays. In practice, this boils down to whether or not we should bother with .mobi sites at all, and this tends to get the web design/development community a little hot under the collar (especially those who’re doing quite well out of developing .mobi sites, we suspect).
A recent article on Memeburn entitled “.mobi is dead, and it’s back to the future” summed it up quite nicely: “Sites and services should be one thing, reformatted, on every device. Granted it may not be the now, but it’s certainly the future”. For “the now”, .mobi sites seem to be firmly entrenched in the South African websphere, as this post by Rob Allen points out, which is hardly surprising given that we have more mobile than fixed Internet users in South Africa.
The big question for anyone looking to create or update a web presence in future, though, is not going to be whether or not it is a good idea to create a distinct .mobi site, but if the question even makes sense any more. Consider that users could be viewing your site on anything from a 72” HDTV to a tiny black and white display on an old Nokia, with tablets, smartphones, feature phones, netbooks, laptops and PC’s fitting in somewhere in the spectrum. Where does .mobi begin or end on that spectrum, and do you really want to be developing a different website optimized for every category of device that exists today, let alone in the future?
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