Responsive Design Workflow

4. Designing in Text

“Plain text is the underlying content stream to which formatting can be applied. [...] Plain text is public, standardized, and universally readable.”

—THE UNICODE STANDARD, VERSION 6.1

The world’s first web page was practically mobile ready. And that was in a time when there were no tablets or smartphones. There’s one simple reason for this: the web page consisted of plain text. Actually, it consisted of structured text with hyperlinks. This was how the web started, and the premise of structured content is still the basic foundation of the web (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1. The world’s first website was essentially mobile ready. ...