Adaptive vs. Responsive - thoughts

[Shack]

Yes, you can build a fluid website without media queries, but at certain breakpoints, you want to change the layout or the font size of a headline, whatever, so that's when you use media queries.

Just think of this like 3 highway lanes. While you drive each lane can expand or shrink its width. Well, at certain points your car will be too big for the lane if it keeps shrinking, so you make 2 lanes from 3, while everything is still fluid, expands or shrinks. Adaptive or responsive, I don't even care, to me is just make shit fit.

 

[boatBurner]

Does it though? It has media queries down to phone size. I thought fluid would use no media queries for a layout, could be wrong though.

Fluid just refers to the use of percentages instead of pixels for block-level elements. It's a supplementary characteristic of responsive design, not a replacement.

 

[Fatbat]

Yes, you can build a fluid website without media queries, but at certain breakpoints, you want to change the layout or the font size of a headline, whatever, so that's when you use media queries.

Just think of this like 3 highway lanes. While you drive each lane can expand or shrink its width. Well, at certain points your car will be too big for the lane if it keeps shrinking, so you make 2 lanes from 3, while everything is still fluid, expands or shrinks. Adaptive or responsive, I don't even care, to me is just make shit fit.

^^ Exactly what he said.

Fluid just refers to the use of percentages instead of pixels for block-level elements. It's a supplementary characteristic of responsive design, not a replacement.

Yup. By default all of Bootstrap's block level elements are 100% width inside a percentile grid system of 12 columns.

So with Bootstrap it fixes the outer container at 1280px and 960px, and the grid inside that is all percentages constrained to those pixel widths and then the block elements inside that are all 100% of their column width. When you drop to 760px the outer container becomes 100% of the screen width and the grid and block elements then conform to that outer container becoming fluid.

I hope I made sense there, I've been out drinking a bit. I think I got that right though

So essentially, a good method is to use a hybrid of both "responsive" and "adaptive". Like I said earlier, mincing words.

 

[elgordo]

Its funny because I came in here about to defend Responsive Design, then realized that my sites are all adaptive.

We pre-define all of the navs, headers, etc. for different resolution ranges. I always thought that was the definition of Responsive, but after a quick 3-minute research quest, apparently that is Adaptive.

Well fuck me.