Response JS: mobile-first progressive enhancement in HTML5..
This is a very interesting project. Responsive design will continue to be a steady topic of conversation in 2012 and tools like this help propel us to talking about it applicably.
Without going into too much detail about responsive design itself, I’d like to point out what Response JS does differently. Their spin is to be a mobile-first responsive design implementation. By piggybacking jQuery you’re able to be much more aggressive in optimizing for the mobile experience in a number of ways.
- Serve resolution-optimized images
- Swap code blocks based on breakpoints
- Methods and hooks to trigger responsive actions
There’s definitely some cool stuff to check out, and with the Web moving to an increasingly JavaScript-dependent environment, we might see more implementations along these lines to make responsive designs more mobile-focused.
As with all good things, there are drawbacks however. Being this aggressive can sometimes take away from the core purpose of being a single document with ‘conditional’ styling that responds to the environment at hand. I’m not saying this direction is a bad thing, in fact I really like that it keeps the idea of progressive enhancement in mind with all it does.
Related: Nathan Smith’s Adapt.js can’t go without mention here.