High Performance Responsive Design

Preface

EVEN THOUGH RESPONSIVE DESIGN IS A FAIRLY UBIQUITOUS TERM AT THIS POINT, it is still considered mainly a frontend concern. In the minds of most developers, responsive design is also tightly coupled with media queries. With this book, however, I propose that responsive design is more of a philosophy rather than a technology: an ideal that can be approached from many different angles, from the traditional frontend-only approach, but also that there is enough information passed to the web server in each HTTP request to be responsive on the backend. And, in some cases, it is a better performing solution to push our responsiveness to the backend.

I originally intended to write this book because although I was seeing designers and engineers around me running with the ideas of producing responsive websites, I also saw business and product owners souring from the idea because they were keenly aware of the web performance costs even when we weren’t always. By focusing only on the responsiveness of the client side and not looking for more performant options, we were slowly disillusioning our stakeholders on the benefits of responsiveness, and even our own effectiveness.

As I got under way with this book, it began to take on a life of its own. After we are paying attention to the performance of our responsive websites, how do we plan for that in our grooming sessions? If we are creating service-level agreements (SLAs) for the performance of our pages, how do we test that performance ...