Choosing a Content Simplification Option

Justin Obara obara.justin at gmail.com
Tue Jun 11 14:49:56 UTC 2013


I won't even attempt to track down all of the responsive sites, but I'd imagine there are lots and the list is growing. Here are some examples: http://mediaqueri.es

However, even for sites that are responsive, there would still be some work to hook into them. Mostly they would have to provide a means for us to make use of their styles defined by media queries. For example we wouldn't want to be programatically changing the window size just to have a different presentation. We'd probably want them to make these responsive designs also available via a class name we could drop on the body or html tag. Another option would be to have a completely different design for the content simplification. This raises the question of whether or not this should also have it's own responsive designs.

All-in-all, I don't think that we can completely avoid a site putting in their own design thought into the process. Our prior attempts at forcing a single column layout showed that we can't predict how the content of a page is or should be laid out. I think our best approach to providing a quick start at implementation would be through one or more of the following:

examples (demos, our own sites)
"base" style sheet that reorganizes/prioritizes content based on a semantic layout (e.g. navigation, articles, etc.)
extensions to existing frameworks like Bootstrap

These would all be ways that integrators could get started on simplifying their content, and they would adapt to meet their specific needs. 

Thanks
Justin


On 2013-06-06, at 1:53 PM, Colin Clark <colinbdclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> Do we have any examples of websites we've found in the wild, or even our web sites, that will be amenable to this sort of simplification mechanism more or less out of the box?
> 
> In other words, do we have evidence of real websites that already present themselves so responsively that UIO could just tweak a few class names and it would all work?
> 
> Colin
> 
> ---
> Colin Clark
> http://fluidproject.org
> 
> On 2013-06-06, at 10:21 AM, Justin Obara <obara.justin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>> 
>>> I guess it's good Colin asked his questions, because my recollection is not quite what Michelle described. Comments in-line below.
>>> 
>>> On 2013-06-05, at 11:43 AM, Michelle D'Souza wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Option 1 - Responsive Layout
>>>> 
>>>> In this design, when simplify is on, the small screen experience is delivered to the user. Although we still need to explore how we'd do this technically, it likely means that we would fetch and include the small screen stylesheet in the page.
>>> 
>>> My understanding was that the only thing this option would do would be to narrow the view, triggering whatever responsive designs the website already has. I did *not( have the impression that this would involve us fetching stylesheets, merely adding a designated class to the body. The website's responsive styles, triggered by a media query, would also have to be triggered by the presence of the class.
>>> 
>>> The mock-ups show a slider for this option, providing various widths. We decided we'd start with simply two widths, the default and a minimum (i.e. an on-off switch), and that we could expand it to a multi-value slider in a future iteration.
>> 
>> My understanding of option 1 is that the onus will be on the integrator to provide the correct styles. In some cases this may mean piggybacking on the responsive styles, others it might be slightly alternate styles. These decisions will be up to the designer/integrator of the site. In terms of work for us, we'll need to support a mechanism for switching between styles; which may be a class on the body. Our demo and integrations that we perform will need to have these design decisions thought out and implemented, and can be used as examples for others.
> 

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