should responsive design be a requirement?

[stevefaulkner]

No description provided.

[astorije]

I vote 👍 on this!
However, keeping a stylesheet as simple as possible is the easiest way to be responsive. When you look at it, current specs are not too bad at being responsive...

[darobin]

But keeping things simple isn't always enough. The two primary offenders are tables and pre blocks. Those tend to perform poorly at low widths. Ideally the styles should cater to that with proper overflowing and the such.

[astorije]

I completely agree @darobin, I was just making a general (useless?) comment.

[liamquin]

On Thu, 2015-04-16 at 07:43 -0700, Robin Berjon wrote:

But keeping things simple isn't always enough. The two primary
offenders are tables and pre blocks. Those tend to perform poorly at
low widths. Ideally the styles should cater to that with proper
overflowing and the such.

Responsive design is a technique. The requirement would be, should the
site cater to devices of different widths, such as 9-character-wide
uppercase-only portable telephones and 4-metre display walls. Although
responsive design may be (and usually is, today) at least part of a
solution for that, it's not the only possible one.

Making the specs mobile-friendly and epub-friendly might indeed
involve limits on the complexity and size of tables, perhaps with the
option to serve alternate content in some cases, for example
transposing wide tables to be tall narrow tables.

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#10 (comment)

[jensimmons]

Yes.

The page should work for all sized screens. No reason not to, imo. If you are wondering who would ever read a spec on their phone — well, I did just the other week. Sat at dinner and read one spec start to finish. I thought I'd printed it out and brought it with me, but I'd printed the wrong one.

[fantasai]

File separate issues if there's something specific that's broken. Responsive design in general is obviously a requirement: it's a fundamental principle of how the Web's layout systems are designed, and why the CSSWG spends so much of its time defining 'auto'. https://twitter.com/sgalineau/status/233244223837720576