4.2 KiB
title: Responsive design is harmful author: 寮 date: 2022-12-13 tags: technology,internet,webdev
Responsive web design is harmful.
I hear you asking, "boomer, what's the big deal?".
Well zoomer, glad you're asking, and I'll explain it right now.
But first, a quick word from today's sponsor!
Just kidding, sponsorships are cancer, and they need to fucking die!
Oh hey, an article within an article, how cool is that?
There are actually good responsive designs (note 1) out there, don't get me wrong.
However, most of the responsive designs are terrible, at least if you're browsing from a real computer.
Stuff 3 or 2 columns into 1 (I do that too, but that's simply because I have nothing to put on the sides), massive-ass images filling up the entire screen, buttons way bigger than Jesus, soycial media share buttons, gigantic font sizes, and so on.
This looks good on smartphone screens, but on screens of real computers it's quite literally eye cancer.
It's as if those who support "responsive design" and "mobile first" actually mean "mobile only, PC is an after thought".
I've warned about that when the "responsive" craze started in the west back in 2015, because over here in Japan it started a few years later, and before that we used to have 2 separate websites; one for PC users, and one for phone users.
But then on one hand Japanese people went smartphone-only en mass, on the other hand mobile providers almost completely managed to kill garake's (basically flip phones with a degoolagged Android base and a heavily locked down UI), and on the 3rd hand (the penis perhaps?) companies here went like "oh, we're lagging behind on the west, so we need to hire western web developers to catch on with the rest of the world", and all of the sudden we got a massive increase of Web 2.0 websoy with an East Asian touch (so the globohomo style mobile-only "responsive" soytes with lots of conversation-style blog posts, Amazon links, Goolag Tags, and BBS-style comments section).
For readability sake, it's better to actually do PC-first web pages.
Smartphone users are already used to do pitch to zoom in order to zoom in, but PC users don't use scroll to zoom in order to zoom out as much.
And don't forget about how polarizing responsive soytes are.
Just compare all the old websites with all the new age ones, the latter all look the same with just a different paint and different text, but other than that they all look like the exact same "the latest iPhone" page on Crapple's websoyte.
Though it used to be worse in that regard, because back when it all started everyone was using the Bootstrap CSS/JS framework, but it seems like at least that part got a bit more diversified nowadays.
And by making PC-first web pages, hopefully we'll reduce the amount of smartphone zombies in public.
Last week while switching metros over in Tokyo, a smartphone zombie suddenly stopped walking exactly in the narrowest possible section of the station to watch an ad in the gatcha "game" he was playing while walking, and since I was walking behind him, I bumped into him, he fell over, and his phone's screen broke.
And while he was mad at me for "not watching out where I go", I told him to be glad that it's the only damage, because his actions could as well have destroyed his bones or face or some shit, and pointed out on the fact he did something dangerous himself.
Though at least he realized his own mistake, it's quite rare nowadays to do so.
So by all means, make your websites as inaccessible on mobile screens as possible, we might eventually fix human behavior in real life through that as well maybe.
And by all means, make mobile "games" as resource heavy as possible, maybe then they will start looking where they're fucking going completely again!
The problem with bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com is that the font is way too big, but I only linked to that one for the reason I just mentioned.