I'm working on a responsive website, but 1 question always bother me is that should we always work from smaller screen size and move up to bigger screen or other way round?
For me I find it easier to work from bigger screen then reduce the browser screen and adjust it slowly. The reason I do this is because I can preserve my original pc screen's design much easier, if I work from smaller screen onwards, adjust it to original pc screen design would be difficult.
Is it better to work from bigger/smaller screen onwards? What is your opinion in terms of performance, loading speed, and coding difficulty?
This goes far beyond just responsive layouts or even CSS. You should optimize anything based on the way it will be used most. If I were making a site that most users would want to use from their phone, then of course, I would start development with the mobile version first! My reasoning is that there tend to be some trade-offs (albeit minor) with how things degrade as the screen size becomes smaller. To make sure the tradeoffs favor the mobile version, it may be best to start there and work toward the desktop version. However, I have always found myself in situations where starting with the desktop size is most practical, then I reduce the screen size and re-style it to my liking with media queries - reduce screen size, restyle, etc. It sounds like that's the approach you are taking and that should be fine unless a project calls for more attention to mobile from the beginning as I said.
No matter what you choose, if you are writing sensible code, the performance will be fine and the code should be understandable.
As m59 said, start with whatever device will be most used. A scenario that can benefit from the mobile to monitor workflow is when you create a new site from the ground up. This scenario leans more towards affecting design decisions because by starting mobile, you include all of the features and contents that are absolutely necessary for the user - the bare necessities . This way you filter out any filler that go into some desktop sites, making your design cleaner and the UI more user-friendly. Also, starting from mobile will allow you to explore and enhance your mobile UI development ability for the future, rather than just learning how to cram it all in.
I'm just now diving into responsive CSS and design, and I'm wondering how I'm supposed to figure out various device widths out. I don't want to spend all day testing every single mobile device possible, I just want to get the responsive layout enough to where it works.
I saw some sites using #media only screen and (max-device-width: xx) but it seems that limits it to very specific resolutions, not actual browser window sizes.
Any advice at all would be great. I'm not new to web development or CSS, but totally new to responsive design.
It would seem that you're trying to figure out where and when to apply your breakpoints.
Rather than testing resolution on a bunch of devices why not build a responsive design that is acceptable at every resolution? There are no magic breakpoints that fix responsive websites for every device because every responsive website is going to differ depending on layout, content, etc. and there are tons of different devices with varying resolutions.
You might be thinking, "what the hell, I am not going to go pixel by pixel and check my website," but that's not really what I mean.
Finding your website's breakpoints:
Jump into a browser, navigate to your website, and open the console
Resize the viewport to a very low resolution. 320px is a good starting point.
(Note: To get the size of the viewport type window.innerWidth in console. See Resources for more ways to enhance debugging your design)
Analyze your layout. How does it look at this resolution? If you need to change the layout at this resolution then its time to add a breakpoint!
Slowly stretch the browser window until something breaks or looks horrible. At this point you'll need to insert another breakpoint.
Repeat step 4 to your heart's content
Keep in mind:
The point of responsive design isn't to make your site look good on all devices, its to make your content look good anywhere - Sam Richards
Resources:
Responsive Web Design - Programming with Anthony
Responsive Typography
Logical Breakpoints For Your Responsive Design
As mentioned in the above video, Modernizr is an awesome JS library that helps in detecting device-specific features
Responsive Design View Feature in Firefox 15+
Responsive Design View Tutorial for Chrome
I was wondering what are you opinions about when coding css, when/why coding fixed or liquid style sheets?
I agree that fixed size style sheets are easier/faster to code because liquid requires more time in order to have all elements well adapting to their parents.
So, when do you chose liquid over fixed (or vice versa)? Why?
Update 2 I think the best practice now is design a site with responsive and adaptive capabilities for any screen size. Liquid CSS may not have the pitfalls that you would think such as long lines of text (instead the block of text position adjusts on-the-fly) - examples of Responsive Design - browser-side code where pages adapt to any screensize:
http://surrey.ac.uk/
http://bostonglobe.com/
http://thoughtfulweb.co.uk/
Adaptive design: server hosting the site detects browser type that requested the page and serves up appropriate page layouts e.g. mobile. This has pitfalls in that the user agent identifiers aren't always precise - e.g. many browsers include the mozilla string in their id, for example, so it might not always be best to rely on this data.
Previous answer
Liquid layouts (layouts that horizontally shrink or stretch to fit the horizontal width of a window)
Advantages: the content reformats on the fly to fully utilise the
Window width. Which means that the dilemma of choosing the most
popular fixed width e.g. 940px, 960px or 978px is not required. This
is particularly useful for small screen handheld devices which vary
slightly. You have to do less work in considering all possible screen
sizes.
Disadvantages: For the reason that the site will shrink or stretch to
fit horizontally, you cannot control the layout as much as fixed
width. Aesthetics and how nice the site looks will be less under your
control. You may find that my point about having to do less work to support all screen widths is not true after all - as here you are considering scenarios where the screen is really small and your menu navigation is all bunched up and ugly or too far apart on a large screen
Fixed layouts (layouts that are fixed and don't change to fit the available horizontal width).
Advantages: Once you have settled on the most popular width e.g. 940px, 960px etc. you would not need to test the site at different screen widths. The layout is neat and things don't move around, aesthetics, how nice things look remains constant
Disadvantages: Some users with small screens, handhelds may need to scroll horizontally to view your site if your fixed width is larger. Unless you also support a mobile edition too that those users can use
Have a look around at major sites - what are they using. To me it seems fixed widths are more popular, including stackoverflow.com
That said, look at this fluid site: http://derekallard.com/
Here, the developer uses fluid layouts to advantage by using layers of graphics that slide over each other as the site width adjusted in your window.
update: There is no wrong or right answer. Both Have merits. Media folk who have come from television, film and newspaper into web may tend to favour fix widths owing to their familiarity with those media having that.
It's not a matter of technique, it's a matter of decision making.
You choose liquid if you (or the client) WANT liquid.
I myself do NOT WANT liquid. Why? With a very wide window you get very long copy text lines, which are hard to read.
OK there are some other parts you must consider. Is your page intended to be accessible? Then you have to make a sort of liquid layout for the ones which zoom the page.
You could also look for responsive web design. The one that works in mobile browsers, too.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/
When left with a choice, I rarely use liquid layout in anything except business style web apps.
I.e. for apps where the customer insists on lots of horizontal information in e.g. tables, I'll go with a liquid layout for obvious reasons. For more standard websites, I'll stick with fixed if at all possible.
When I do go liquid for the latter, I'll mostly still enforce a max-width on copy text, because I'm not particularly politically correct, and making the site a joy to read for 99% of visitors is more important to me than making it a (relative) breeze to use for a few - as long as I keep it accessible to those few. Like yunzen says, line length of copy text is very important to both design and readability. Don't let those lines stretch to infinity...
Mostly, my fixed layout sites will have different ways of accomodating the smaller screen size rather than just simple liquid stretching - moving side bars and such beneath the text, and possibly adjusting the copy text width to fit the device viewport. Sometimes, but not always, that requires css media queries.
(see e.g. http://www.quirksmode.org/mobile/viewports2.html)
Usually fixed layouts are easier to design and develop, also visitors are used to this kind of layout.
Fluid layouts need more planning and also do not fit in all kinds of web application. I do not use the fluid approach very often.
In this question, it is said in the most upvoted answer:
Use liquid layouts
Why this is considered a good practice ? My opinion is that it is more difficult to dezign a liquid layouts because it can vary quite a bit from one window size to another... Is the extra complexity worth it ? What i should take into account to make the choice ?
Hmm, I disagree with that. With a fixed-width layout you can create something which will be viewed the same on all browsers.
I've been in web design and development for quite a while now and there have been very few times I've ever used liquid layouts on a website.
There are some times when it can come in useful, web apps sometimes can benefit from having a liquid layout. However, the safest (in terms of design and everything working across different browsers, screens etc), best looking (in my opinion) and "standard" way to create websites is with a fixed width.
Just look around. See the websites which have a liquid layout and ask yourself why they have a liquid layout. Do they have a lot of areas of dynamic/varying text for instance? Lots of information to show? Lack of visual/graphical design? Its a very subjective area, but one which you'll have to choose between. Does your website look better fixed or liquid? Do you want people with huge monitors (like me - 27" imac) to have to see your website really fat? I hate viewing amazon on my mac!
Personnaly I find liquid layouts are always harder to work with, but they look nicer when it is nicely designed.
You can take a look at some grid css frameworks that can help you working with liquid layout.
http://www.designbyfire.com/liquid_blueprint/tests/liquid.html blueprint liquid
http://www.designinfluences.com/fluid960gs/ Fluid 960 Grid System
The right choice depend on what are your needs.
Liquid layouts are perhaps more difficult to understand and implement, but you gain flexibility.
A flexibile layout means it can easily adapt to different screen resolutions.
Once you have your liquid layout done, you can possibly adapt it also for mobile websites (if it isn't already) with a couple of changes, mainly CSS rules.
With the fast pace at which new technologies come out (new devices, new screens, new resolutions, 16:9, 16:10, Full HD etc), you can easily implement a layout which has no problem displaying at various resolutions on different displays.
This is what liquid layouts are for.
On the other hand, a static website is nothing more than what we've seen in the past years, like a centered 960px wide page, unable to being displayed on most mobiles, and even if they display it, good luck navigating the website.
Note that you can actually implement a sort of hybrid: a fixed size layout, with a max width of let's say 960px to be viewable in desktop browsers normally, which then adapt to lower resolution with an auto width.
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Is it bad in terms of compatibility to use pixel numbers in CSS instead of percentages? How about lower resolutions? Is it okay to work with them in ranges of 1-100?
All of the measurements have their own purposes:
Use pixels for pixel-based things, like borders. You probably don't want a border that ends up being 1.3422 pixels wide.
Use text-centric measures (em, ex) for text-based things, like content areas, labels, and input boxes. It's an easy way to make sure you have room for text of a certain length and width.
Use percents for window-based things, like columns.
There are exceptions, of course. For example, you might want to specify a minimum column width in pixels. But follow the above and your pages will scale well. ALWAYS zoom in and out on your pages to see how they work with different font sizes and browser shapes -- don't get surprised later.
This is a difficult question, because the answer mostly depends on your situation.
Pixels are not that bad, I mostly use them too. (Sometimes even for font sizes.)
I usually fix the outer block element of the layout by a given size (pixels with fixed-width layouts, and percentages with fluid layouts), and on the inside elements I usually set percentages whenever possible.
There are some elements which simply can't be styled with percentages or ems, especially the more fancy stuff coming from graphical designers who don't understand such principles.
For example: if you have a column on your site with a simple style, you can set its width to a percentage easily, but if it has a background image with a specific width that is not designed with scaling in mind, it only looks good with a fixed-width. In such cases, you'll have to ensure that the rest of the page occupies the remaining width correctly.
Note that you can use pixels with percentages together.
For example, this is a snippet from one of my latest web apps:
min-width: 800px;
width: 80%;
max-width: 1500px;
The choice also depends on what design or layout you would like to achieve.
For a fixed-width layout, pixel values are fine. If a designer gives you a Photoshop image that contains really fancy stuff which would be extremely complicated to even think about how it would resize, you should definitely go for this.
If your layout needs to be dynamic, you should use percentages to make sure that it expands as the resolution changes, and you can use the above code snippet to make it look better in scenarios where it would otherwise look insane.
Some layouts (eg. imagine if StackOverflow would take up all the space) would look pretty ugly on a width of eg. 1920 pixels - the line widths would be so insanely high that it would be extremely unconvenient to read.
This is what max-width is for. Even in some dynamic layouts, you'll have to limit the maximal width of your site to maximize usability and readability.
And also take into consideration the smaller screens.
It is true that noone uses a 800×600 desktop anymore, but many people browse the web with mobile devices which have even smaller resolution.
This is what min-width is for: to make your dynamically expanded layout look less crowded on smaller resoultions.
I hope this helps.
EDIT:
The Smashing Book has some very nice thoughts about the subject.
EDIT 2:
I don't want my post to sound like I want you to force pixel-based sizing on your visitors.
(Apparently, some people in the comments misunderstood me in such a way.)
To clear it up:
I believe that the ideal layout is one that adjusts well to any possible resolution or setting.
However, we can't always do everything perfectly. Time/resources and the target audience are the key to determine if your site requires that advanced functionality or not.
I'm suggesting that you use the right thing for the given job.
If you are developing a site which will have a significant percentage of visitors who require more advanced adjustments to the site, it may be well worth it.
(Of course, sometimes we just do it for ourselves to have the feeling of doing things the right way, but is is not always a financially sound decision.)
Still, you should do the proper research about what sort of site will be it, who will be the visitors, and such stuff, before deciding about layouts, and whether it is worth the time to make them fluid or more dynamic.
Font sizes
I think you must first understand the issues that exist with working with pixels in CSS:
Zoom in older browsers is broken. For example, IE6 and IE7 do not resize text when zooming. Line-height can be quirky too. These problems do not exist in modern browsers, but they are a reason why many shy away from using pixels for font sizes.
Everybody will see text the same size if you specify the font size in pixels. Browsers have a default size of 16px for paragraphs, so if you only use em and other relative sizes, you will respect the decision of users who change this. This is especially important on text heavy sites, especially if there are more older users. On the other hand, if the design of a site is important I think it is possible and justifiable to use px to specify font sizes without breaking usability.
In the end, you need to make the decision yourself, and it does depend on the exact circumstances, but I think that specifying font sizes in pixels is okay.
By the way, when working with em to specify font size it is a good idea to set the body to font-size: 62.5%. This means the base font size is 10px, so 1em is 10px, 1.6em is 16px and so on, making it easier to think in pixels while designing using ems. I still find it frustrating to work like this, especially when the values of ems cascade. There are some very handy sites like PXtoEM.com that help with this.
Layout issues
The screen is a pixel based layout, so pixels are an intuitive choice for many things. The main issue here is that different users have different screen sizes. As others have pointed out, using min-width and max-width in pixels along with width in percent is a helpful way to respect the size of the screen, while preventing your site to be unreasonably squished or stretched on very small and very large windows.
However, I would generally avoid this approach in favour of CSS media queries. You can then use fixed width chunks and make the layout wider (amongst other things) as the screen size increases. However, CSS media queries, like all cool web technologies, suffers from lack of browser support. Most notably, IE8 and earlier do not support them, although there are JavaScript fixes. On the other hand, the iPhone and other handheld devices do support them, and I would strongly recommend them if you want your site to look nice on these devices.
I think fixed width grids are fine. Fixed width grid systems like 960 Grid System
are popular enough in their own right, and there are so many other sites that have a fixed width, that I doubt you would hear many complaints if you did this. Handheld devices that do not have large screens are an issue, but this is where CSS media queries should be used, so it is possible to specify everything in pixels and have your site looking beautiful on the desktop and on the iPhone.
Conclusion
Ultimately, everything depends on who your users are, what you need to support, and what you want your site to look like, but there is nothing inherently wrong with using pixels in CSS.
That depends on what you are styling. For columns for example, the width should probably depend on the text size to ensure that it will look optimal on multiple resolutions/screens. If you want to divide your page in two parts, you should use percentages. But if you want a 1px border between these two parts, independent of the resolution, use pixels.
Basically it depends on who's hiring you and consequently the audience of your work.
For institutional purposes (where content should prevail over the shape, like a goverment project), you better work with .em or %, they are harder to control, but they will be really user friendly in terms of accessibility.
If we talk about corporative Websites (Where shape is the deal) pixel will be a more accurate tool to fulfill your customer expectation regarding his brand.
A liquid interface (%, .em) is always a good stuff when it is smartly done, but don't forget to check your design under extreme conditions and be sure that it will be stable.
If you work with pixels, you will have absolute control over the final look of your site, but you will have to assume the impossibility for some user's to operate with it efficiently.
Best option: rather than designing a Website compatible for all platforms (what will result in a multi-deficiency design) suggest your customers special versions of the site adapted for every demand, what is a better practice and a better business for a designer too...
I would say avoid it if possible except for in certain cases.
For instance for a thin border it's ok to just specify 1px.
Also for max- and min- style attributes it is ok. But then make the non-max/min attribute be a percentage if possible.
This really is a good question which I have asked many times before. Not being a hardcore web designer (I'm more on the development side) I've usually asked the designers I work with about their opinions, and here is what I have distilled:
Using percentages vs pixels for sizing elements and so on is really a matter of personal taste or the requirements in each specific case. If you need it to scale, or it will scale well, use percentages. If not, use pixels. People here have used the examples of major columns in a page maybe needing to be fluid but borders may well need the precision of a pixel measurement.
Obviously sizing images is pretty much tied to their resolution and pixel units, so I always use them in this case.
However, using em sizing versus pixel or even point sizing for text is a whole different kettle of fish. Most of the guys I work with have a base reset style for font sizes which brings the size of 1em down to about 12px. They then use ems everywhere else (or as near to everywhere else as is possible) to size text elements, form controls and the like. This is how I operate now too as it seems to work well across a variety of browsers, OSes and DPIs on desktops and laptops. I can't vouch for mobile devices though.
Accessibility is the key though - if you need to make something usable for people with disabilities or work on a variety of devices out the box, even things you may consider old, then scaling will be a requirement. Build it into your model for designing the site from the get-go and you may realise that absolute pixel sizing is not even needed in that case.
For example, an art-heavy design is probably going to be designed at a single scale, but the new educational website for disabled users is going to have to work in a variety of situations.
Just remember, the W3C put a variety of methods for sizing and scaling into their specifications for a reason - flexibility. Do whatever fits best and works well for your audience (as Moustard said earlier).
I'm not a css/html expert but convention I use is to use pixels for the outer containers and percentages for the inner objects.
Another rule of thumb I have with anyone reviewing my layout is a Three Pixel Rule. It is rare that everything will line up exactly within every browser out there. We've agreed the effort outweighs the benefits to move anything three pixels or less.
Do the right thing by default. If a user visits your site with javascript disabled and no preference cookies, you should serve them a web page that is as functional and accessible as possible.
Your default stylesheet should assume nothing about the browser window, and still render a functional page, however hideous, down to 320x320 resolution, and up to unbounded sizes. If photographic fidelity is so important that you can't trust browser scaling, and sometimes it is, then you should use pixel measurements (at least minimums) for elements encapsulating images of fixed size, to make sure that you don't end up with important things being covered up. Specifying minimum widths along with percentages should give you the control you need while giving your users the accessibility they need. Even if accessibility isn't an issue now, it will be later if the site is successful.
When you do know more about the browser window, then it's okay to use fixed widths in alternate stylesheets, if the importance of preserving the design justifies the added work.
If you're targeting a fixed size then pixels are fine. But if you want your layout to look good on various resolutions/screen sizes, then you should stick to more relative measures like percentages. Most folks are targeting the latter.
It is ok if that is what it takes to please your client. Most of the time, you can't balance the amount of space in diverse screen sizes with only percentages. CSS3 media queries helps here but adoption is still problematic.
I prefer pixel in most cases.
For example - default width of content ares: 960px.
In "1024" it will be ok, with small free spaces on the both side of the screen. Put some gradient or background there. In "1280" or "1440" or "1680", or whatever - there will be bigger and bigger gap, but it will look nice.
Yep, for 800 - this site will be ugly. But who cares? Every major players dropped support for 800. There are too few people with this resolution..
There are many various sites, where %% will be much better solution, though.
The building blocks of a screen are pixels. You can't go wrong with fixed pixel sizes. As other posters have mentioned, you can also use percentages or "em"s for a scalable substitute.