Web Design Miami Beach

Responsive Web Design: Device Agnostic vs Device Aware

October 14, 2012 Web Developers Miami Beach FL

Responsive Web Design | Wikipedia: Truth by Consensus

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If you search for “truth by consensus” on Google Images the first result might be this one, which questions whether Wikipedia should be considered a reliable source of information. The answer is, it shouldn’t. Wikipedia entries are truth by consensus and – like our mainstream media news reports – often neither all true nor all of the truth.

The Wikipedia entry on Responsive Web Design is a representative example. It starts out with an acceptable definition of the term…

“Responsive web design (often abbreviated to RWD) is an approach to web design in which a site is crafted to provide an optimal viewing experience – easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling – across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).”

…but from the next sentence on it is effectively an advertisement for the client-side “device agnostic” approach which totally – and falsely – discounts the server-side “device aware” approach with artificial conflations, half-truths and outright lies like this one:

“Where a web site must support basic mobile devices that lack Javascript, Browser (‘user agent’) detection (also called ‘browser sniffing’), and mobile device detection are two ways of deducing if certain HTML and CSS features are supported (as a basis for progressive enhancement) – however, these methods are not so reliable.”

That’s an improvement over how this sentence read before we first called them out on their misrepresentations of responsive web design a week or so ago…

“Browser detection and mobile device detection are completely unreliable … ways to determine whether Javascript and certain HTML and CSS features are supported.”

…but the unknown authors’ retreat from “completely unreliable” to “not so reliable” hardly constitutes a corrected assessment when – as our rebuttal supported – “…the real truth is browser detection was NEVER ‘completely unreliable’ and accuracy rates for mobile device detection can top 99.8%.”

Device agnostic responsive web design and so-called “progressive enhancement” development methodologies eschew device detection and rely on CSS media queries, fluid grids and flexible images. Device aware RWD and mobile-friendly Web 3.0 front-end development, on the other hand, rely principally on device detection using DDRs (device description repositories), PHP and Javascript. Wikipedia may never provide an objective comparison of the pros and cons of these divergent approaches, but Ronan Cremin and Luca Passani do in an expertly researched and professionally presented Smashing Magazine article entitled Server-Side Device Detection: History, Benefits And How-To. Here’s their take in a nutshell:

“While many [device agnostic] designers embrace the flexible nature of the Web, with [device aware] device detection, you can fine-tune the experience to exactly match the requirements of the user and the device they are using. This is often the main argument for device detection – it enables you to deliver a small contained experience to feature phones, a rich JavaScript-enhanced solution to smartphones and a lean-back experience to TVs, all from the same URL. In my opinion, no other technique has this expressive range today. This is the reason why Facebook, Google, eBay, Yahoo, Netflix and many other major Internet brands use device detection [and] why Twitter recently abandoned its client-side [device agnostic] rendering approach in favor of a server-side [device aware] model.”

Cremin and Passani cover all the bases except one: If you want RWD like this, you can forget about reliance on responsive web design testing that assumes an iframe is the same thing as as iPhone because your web page source will have to pass meaningful validations like these.

Any questions?

 

Image Credit: http://zengardner.com/wp-content/uploads/truth-lies1.jpg

Web Design Miami Beach | Diseño Web Miami Beach

August 25, 2012 Web Developers Miami Beach FL

Web Design Miami Beach | Diseño Web Miami Beach

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Web Design Miami Beach” – as we define that term – means search-friendly, mobile-friendly multilingual Semantic Web 3.0 website design and front-end web development. To learn more about what that can mean for you, give us a call at 305-597-8340.

 

Spanglish Websites: W3C Internationalization, Bilingual Content, Polyglot Markup

August 18, 2012 Web Developers Miami Beach FL

para ayuda en español llame al 305-517-3851
Spanglish Websites

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The Royal Spanish Academy (in Spanish: Real Academia Española or RAE) is the organization responsible for regulating the Spanish language. In July 2012, the RAE announced that the word espanglish (in English: Spanglish) will be included in the next edition of their dictionary scheduled for publication in 2014. The definition accompanying it translates as:

“A form of speech used by some Hispanic groups in the United States in which they mix deformed elements of vocabulary and grammar from both Spanish and English.”

With Borinqueños, Chicanos, Cubanos, Latinos, Mexicanos, other Hispanics and Spanglish-speaking peoples accounting for 20% or more of the U.S. population-and of course a much higher percentage in areas like Southern California, Texas and South Florida-many may find the REA’s definition of espanglés to be as misleading as it is late in coming. Most of us who live and work in multicultural areas like Greater Miami, for example, learn to appreciate the richness of mixed-language communications and respect that incorporating them into your business operations and marketing resources is always a competitive advantage and often a practical necessity.

Creating and presenting content for Spanglish websites and blogs requires more than colorfully interwoven combinations of bilingual Spanish/English text. For high search visibility and broad accessibility, the underlying source and scripting must render HTML and CSS that complies with W3C internationalization standards, guidelines and conventions for polyglot markup (XML/HTML) and multilingual content.