jasoncorns.com

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Why jealousy?  I have not had the opportunity to work on a responsive redesign yet; REALLY jealous of all parties involved!

A short while ago, the Boston Globe rolled out a redesigned website. To say that it was just redesigned is an understatement, though – the new entity is the result of Responsive Web Design.

This very buzzwordy descriptor is a new philosophy in web design where content is delivered in principally the same manner to all devices but its presentation is adjusted to accommodate the browser’s screen size and orientation. There is a single site that works for both desktop and mobile displays in both portrait and landscape. In the past, this has been accomplished by developing a site per visitor type – one site for the iPhone visitors, one for Blackberry visitors, a ‘main’/'regular’/'desktop’ site, etc. Sure, designers and developers could combine some of the views and use a generic ‘mobile’ site, but the idea was the same.

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In another post, Jason vs. Page Weight – Accessibility Series, pt. 2, I talked about a page weight problem I had with a client.  In the end, the client decided to put a lot of data on a single page.  In my opinion, this would have been a great time to use AJAX to pull in the data rather than just pushing it all to the page at load.  The problem with AJAX is that it relies on JavaScript (reliance may, in fact, be too weak a term, honestly) and so would not have been ideal for search engines and would not have provided accessible page content.  We could fix that by linking to pages with additional content, but we really want to use AJAX to show the data on a single page for all visitors with JavaScript enabled.  So, we just do both.

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When the topic of Web Accessibility arises, I immediately think of a standard set of keywords: ADA/508 compliance, information architecture, JavaScript, well-formed HTML, ALT text, etc.  This list represents the things that, as I have been taught over the past few years, have significant impact on the accessibility of a page and a site.

Recently, during an accessibility assessment, I discovered a new factor to consider: page weight.  Page Weight should not be a new concept to any web designer.  Ever since the days of dial-up dominance, we have been scrutinizing every paragraph, abusing calculators to determine the most appropriate image collection, mapping the dimension and location of every new icon and rollover in our sprite, clocking speed tests and ripping out every non-essential bit of white-space we could find.  I admit that I have become a little lax, allowing more and larger images on my page for the sake of design, all the while whispering silent apologies to the dial-up community.

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Usability is finally starting to bubble to the top for Web Designers and Information Architects.  We are, as an industry, starting to realize that our audience exists outside of Photoshop canvas and beyond the code.  In fact, I have witnessed an increased focus on JavaScript degradation over the past few months – an unspoken admission that we, as web design professionals, should and shall provide web content to users of all browsing backgrounds and capabilities.  We have started providing, in earnest, content for the connoisseurs, the design savvy, the critics and the forward thinkers all in tandem with the conservative visitors, the visually impaired, our friends on mobile devices and those that, for whatever reason, just have JavaScript disabled.

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