The Essentials of Responsive Web Design

When the first edition of this book came out in 2012, responsive web design was a new and exciting possibility to address the needs of the ever-growing list of devices that could access the internet. A decade later, as I write this in 2022, it’s simply the de facto standard. If you’re building a website or web application and it isn’t responsive, you’re probably doing it wrong!

This first chapter serves as a quick and basic refresher on building out an extremely simple web design, responsively. By the end, we will have covered everything needed to author a fully responsive web page.

You might be wondering, why do we need the other chapters then? By the end of this chapter, that should be apparent too.

Here’s what we will cover in this first chapter:

• The ever-evolving browser and device landscape
• Defining responsive web design
• Setting browser support levels
• A brief discussion...