Moore’s Law and Responsive Design Breakpoints

Ray Kurzweil

Since hearing Ray Kurzweil talk about Moore’s Law at SXSW Interactive this year, I keep thinking about how it applies to web education and web design best practices. Yesterday, Jeremy Keith was talking about breakpoints at Adactio.

Jeremy’s point (with lots of excellent references) is that there is no longer a set pixel value that we can consider “common breakpoints” for responsive design. Device size is changing too rapidly to have a handful of numbers that can become exact values for breakpoints in @media queries. One of Jeremy’s comments:

I think our collective obsession with trying to nail down “common” breakpoints has led to a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of responsive design: it’s not about what happens at the breakpoints—it’s about what happens betweenthe breakpoints.

You’ve probably seen the news about Google Glasses. If Moore’s Law tells us anything, it tells us that Google Glasses are not an oddity, but an inevitable application of technological progress.

In terms of responsive design, what’s the breakpoint for Google Glasses? Or what’s the breakpoint for a web browser embedded in your eye or your brain? A technology like that is probably on the way.

I’m really excited about responsive design. I think it’s brilliant and necessary in the current state of web education and web design. But it isn’t the last thing that designers need to learn or think about when looking to the future size of web accessible devices.

 

Useful links: W3C news, responsive tables, responsive templates

Two announcements from the W3C relating to accessibility are important news today. The first is a couple of new notes relating to WCAG 2.0. You can find links to the relevant documents here. The other announcement is the first draft of the Media Accessibility User Requirements. The W3C description of the media requirements document: “It first provides an introduction to the needs of users with disabilties in relation to audio and video. Then it explains what alternative content technologies have been developed to help such users gain access to the content of audio and video.”

A Responsive Design Approach for Complex, Multicolumn Data Tables.

Initializr. A responsive design template from verekia.

Useful links: Google+ on WordPress, HTML5, YouTube SEO, Responsive Design

Three Ways To Display Your Latest Google+ Updates On WordPress from wpmods.

searching for signal gives us: The Most Important Parts of HTML5, or Why audio and video are Boring, or The New Web Platform, or an Introduction to HTML5. Yes, all that.

YouTube Tips: Blown Away by Phyllis Khare tells you some tips that will improve SEO (and accessibility) for your YouTube videos.

Beginner’s Guide to Responsive Web Design from Think Vitamin is a good resource/reference for getting people started with responsive design.