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Designer/developer at BaseKit Joined over 8 years ago
Very true, having and sticking with a dedicated mobile site is not always a bad idea.
But I was specifically addressing using a mobile site as a stop gap to get to a single fully responsive site, as the question seemed to suggest is the intention here. In which case I’d suggest that the technical issues make a separate mobile site more trouble than it’s worth.
I speak from a somewhat painful experience ;)
I’d rule out option A. The technical costs of supporting this over time are not worth the short term gains.
Using a separate ‘m.’ domain will require you to keep those links in tact long after you move to a fully responsive site. In addition, to provide a good user experience you’ll also want to ensure that visitors to ‘m.’ get redirected back to the desktop site if they’re on a desktop browser since people share links from mobile.
You’ve also got the cost of maintaining two sites in your codebase, and likely using some pretty precarious sharing of resources. You’ll also have the concern of avoiding penalisation by Google et al, which can be difficult.
The incremental option is likely to result in significantly less technical debt.
Last time someone asked this Sass won by some margin.
There’s also Dribbble@2x for Safari users.
I think the cleanliness of the site is the important thing.
On a lot of news magazine sites (the nightmare that is forbes.com instantly comes to mind) there’s a load of crap stuck all over the place, in that context it’s going to be difficult for a user to spot.
On a clean site it’s a lot easier to get away with.
I do think that if you feel the need to add an inelegant popover to point out where the navigation is–as is the case with TIME–you’re doing it wrong.
Vim Genius is a pretty great interactive tutorial.
This really in-depth article is pretty useful.
You should also use the ctrlp plugin for super fast navigation between files.
Not a dumb idea at all, there’s a spec in the works that proposes something very similar: http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-cascade/#all-shorthand
It would be nice to be able to link to individual comments on a post.
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XScope has a cool little tool that lets you view the screen as it would appear to people with different types of colourblindness, along with the percentage of the population affected by each type.
Really useful for quickly testing the colour accessibility of a design.