High Performance Responsive Design

Chapter 4. The Backend

The thesis of this chapter—and really that of the entire book—is that to think about responsive web design as a frontend-only skill set is to limit the scope of what you can do and what tools are available to you. We are web developers, and as such we should be able to take advantage of the entire web stack in everything that we do. This chapter outlines how we can start thinking responsively from the backend.

The Web Stack

Before we begin, I should define what the web stack is, because it is in fact a collection of several stacks. And, as we are talking about the Web, let’s start with the network stack.

The Network Stack

The network stack is a collection of protocols that outline how networked systems communicate. It is made up of the following layers:

Data link layer

This usually corresponds the standard way that hardware connects to the network. For our purposes, this is either via Ethernet, specifically the IEEE 802.3 standard for physically interconnected devices (http://bit.ly/ethernet-standards), or via WiFi, specifically the IEEE 802.11 standard for wirelessly interconnected devices (http://bit.ly/1p8UW6P).

Network layer

This layer corresponds to the standards that define communication and identification of nodes on a network, specifically the protocol IP, or Internet Protocol. It is through the Internet Protocol that nodes are identified via IP addresses and data is sent via packets between these hosts. The standard for Internet Protocol is maintained in ...