Preface
In May 2010 I read an article on the A List Apart website. If you picked up this book, it’s likely that you know the article I’m talking about. You’ve probably read it and heard it quoted, picked apart, debated, and discussed. Now, nearly four years later, that article is the basis of one of the biggest movements on the web since the web standards movement of the late 90s.
When Ethan Marcotte’s article, “Responsive Web Design,”[1] was published, I was still new to web development, having just started a job at my first web production agency. It had been a few months since I had bought my first iPhone and I had just started coding sites for mobile and including mobile stylesheets in my projects. I was struggling to find a good solution to mobile web development, like many developers at the time.
The iPhone changed everything and was quickly becoming my favorite way of browsing the web, but websites looked like garbage on it. Ethan’s article came as a revelation—and a relief. It provided a clear path to solving a huge and immediate problem in my development workflow, and by June 2010 I started including media queries in all of my work. Responsive web design gave me something new and exciting to add to my projects and thoroughly solved the problem of mobile web design.