Rethinking responsive building techniques with Drupal

We’ve had over a year to think about how “Responsive web design” affects us. The relatively straightforward techniques described in Ethan Marcotte’s book and A List Apart article won’t be covered in this session. Instead, we’ll think about the limitations we’ve placed on ourselves with our current building techniques and how to break free from them. Break free from regions. Break free from CSS limitations. Break free from the difficulties inherit in responsive design. In this session, I'll describe practical implementation techniques for responsive design using CSS (or Sass/Compass) and Drupal themes and modules, including Zen, Fences, Field Collection, Panels, Chaos Tools and Display Suite to name…erm… quite a few. We’ll cover these topics:
  • Building techniques for responsive layouts:
    • Content first (aka Mobile First, aka Semantic HTML source order)
    • The Adjacent Sibling Rule
    • The Opposing Float
    • The Lasso
    • The Corset Variant
    • The Absolute Exception
    • The Violator
  • Gutters with media queries
  • Responsive background images
  • How to deliver responsive images to different device sizes
  • How to integrate media queries with your Drupal theme and modules without making the CSS Cascade insane or killing performance
  • How not to pick breakpoints
  • Improving front-end performance by configuring lean, semantic markup with Fences
  • How to make your main content be responsive with Page Manager
  • How to test your design on mobile browsers

Speakers

Time slot: 
Tuesday 2:15pm-3:15pm
Room: 
Track: 
Mobile
Experience level: 
Intermediate
Questions answered by this session: 
The CSS for layouts is hard! With responsive design, I have to write even more of it. How can I make building layouts quick, easy and (dare I say) fun?
How do I easily get lean, semantic markup for improved front-end performance?
What's the best (and worst) way to use media queries in your stylesheets?
What's the best way to set up responsive images?
What’s a re-usable way to get responsive content?
Presentation slides: 

Comments

To further discuss Sass/Compass in Drupal and the new Zen Grids extension, I've set up a BOF for later in the day, 5-6pm: http://denver2012.drupal.org/bof/sasscompass-drupal-and-zen-grids

Are the slides for this session going to be posted?

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