Re: Mobile first vs desktop first

Thanks everyone for input on this! It was super helpful! I've tried to gather all the comments into the following:

https://etherpad.mozilla.org/ShRTCPEZCU  

Please feel free to modify the above. I'll file it tomorrow so people have a chance to make modifications as needed.  

Below, I've responded to some of the emails.  


On Monday, December 10, 2012 at 4:16 PM, Kevin Mack wrote:

> I have taken a new approach, rather than looking at Desktop/Mobile I look at "Conditional-First". As architects/designers/developers we need to focus on the user's experience by the capabilities and limitations of their browser and output the best solution based around conditionals. These conditionals are drivers for how the content can be displayed and how users will interact. Looking at width is just one of many factors for having a positive user experience and it seems to be the one that we have all focused on the most.  
>  
> As a side note, I would also love to see "Desktop" and "Mobile" dropped entirely from this discussion and use it "Full-Scale" and "Smallest-Scale" Layout.
I think these are good points, and I'm pretty certain this is exactly what we are going to get hit with in response from the WHATWG/HTMLWG.  

Architecturally speaking, I personally think this is a good abstraction of the problem, but I also think it might be too high level and sometimes hard to conceptually deal with (i.e., it's much easier to go from "I have this phone, this bigger phone, this tablet, and computer… they mostly do the same thing, but have some differences I can take advantage of -- or challenges I have to deal with.")… see  [1] for a good discussion of this problem.  

So, going with a "conditional-first" abstracts the problem to a higher plane, but we are still primarily solving problems mostly for mobile phones, more recently tablets, and desktop computers. Yes, there are probably a few rare cases where people are targeting other devices, but today that is really quite rare (say, less than 1% I would imagine).

However, if people are targeting other devices (e.g., fridges, televisions, funky-weird-thingo™), it would be helpful to hear what those things are.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html

On Monday, December 10, 2012 at 4:23 PM, Konopacki, Daniel wrote:
> For reference to latency, and what it means to mobile, here is an article from Ilya Grigorik (Google) about the topic (near the bottom): http://www.igvita.com/2012/07/19/latency-the-new-web-performance-bottleneck/
FWIW, Ilya has been very helpful throughout this process and has been commenting on a lot of bugs over on Github (see [1]). We reached out to him to comment on the supporting multiple types (see [2]).

[1] https://github.com/ResponsiveImagesCG/ri-usecases/issues/16
[2] https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=20214


On Monday, December 10, 2012 at 6:02 PM, Nicolas Gallagher wrote:
> To more loosely couple the wording with today's dev landscape, it might be worthwhile to think about how things can be explained more broadly, and use "mobile first" as an example, contemporary manifestation of progressive enhancement.
agree.  

--
Marcos Caceres

Received on Wednesday, 12 December 2012 15:19:21 UTC