On mobile, responsive design is often anything but

18 May 2015 • markokarppinen.com

Our workaround is a pre-rendered, device-specific screenshot of the HTML content. We start with the screenshot as a preview, then crossfade to the HTML once it’s rendered. Our previews are typically pixel perfect, so the only difference users see is the seemingly improved rendering speed.

So for both tablet publications and rich media ads, our secret sauce is a server providing fixed, device-specific layout data. This is the technological opposite of responsive design. It works beautifully.

Interesting approach, but this feels like a very bad trend to me - and how does it handle users who desire larger of smaller text sizes? Are we right back to serving up inaccessible static images all over again? I remember when that was all the paper magazines did with their iPad apps - it was terrible - and then Retina iPads came out and made the situation even worse. I’m not sure it’s ever improved.

I’m not sure what the solution here is, but I don’t think this is it.