Responsible Responsive Design

Foreword

The web is a sucker for a good metaphor. In its early days, it was our printing press; as it got older, it was our playground, then our marketplace; now, it’s our photo albums, our diaries, our travelogues, our shared moments and videos and GIFs and... and, and, and. What’s more, thanks to the explosive popularity of handheld, web-ready devices, the web is accessed more broadly today than at any point in its short lifespan. I think it’s fair to say the web is more than the sum of its underpinnings, evolving from a tangle of wires flinging packets over HTTP to a place where we publish, we sell, we connect, we work, and we play.

But here’s the thing: the web is far more fragile than we might like to admit. It’s fraught with uncertainty—a ...