Responsive websites that are not so responsive
Franco Scarpa

Franco Scarpa @francoscarpa

About: BD in CS 🎓 Azure Developer at Nebula 🖥 Web Developer 🌐 Blogger ✍🏻 Always Learning 📚 Minimalism and Performance ⚙️ Lover of JAMStack and Eleventy ❤️

Location:
Venice
Joined:
Jun 17, 2019

Responsive websites that are not so responsive

Publish Date: Dec 19 '19
5 4

I embrace the fluidity of the web. People use all kinds of devices, from smartwatches to TVs. It’s almost impossible to provide the same, exact UX to all of them.

In this regard, I wonder what’s the best way to make a website really responsive. Most of the sites use a fixed-width body after a specific (break)point, with auto margins to center it horizontally. This image is a screenshot of a webpage seen on a 4K TV:

Alt Text

I find it to be a not so good philosophy when building truly responsive websites: why do I have to see a site in so an uncomfortable way when I see it on a TV, therefore viewing it from afar? Shouldn’t we build websites that scale well, in a way that lets them take advantage of all the screen’s space? Shouldn’t we use truly responsive typography and layouts? Of course, using fixed-width after a breakpoint we think is appropriate is a good way to give us more control, but again, I think this doesn’t embrace the responsive philosophy completely.

Comments 4 total

  • Nicholas Stimpson
    Nicholas StimpsonDec 19, 2019

    The trick in such cases is to manage the line lengths to a reasonable number of characters. If the site chooses a font size based on the screen width to achieve it, then it has the effect of disabling text zoom, which is an accessibility problem. So I suspect a better approach is to present content in a variable number of columns of text. But whether that works or not depends very much on the nature of the content being presented on the page.

    • Franco Scarpa
      Franco ScarpaDec 19, 2019

      Look at here. I use this approach on my personal website.

      • Nicholas Stimpson
        Nicholas StimpsonDec 19, 2019

        Yes, that's a good idea. Will need to look into that more carefully.

  • TutorialsMate
    TutorialsMateJun 22, 2020

    Is it responsive 👉 tutorialsmate.com
    Can you please check it. I checked its responsiveness from different sites and I got it almost ok in every of their each resolution. However, there was no option to check it in 4k.

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