Yesterday Brad Frost (@bradfrost) tweeted this:
This is what happens when you smoke crack then write an article about responsive web design: http://t.co/HcPjqaV77c
— Brad Frost (@brad_frost) February 4, 2014
The link lands you on an article from Mobile Marketer titled: Responsive Web design not a long-term solution to mobility: Forrester
Please take a minute to read this article so you can do this:
I can’t decide if this article is meant to stir the pot and get people like Brad, Luke, me, and any other RWD evangelist up in arms, or if they are serious. My fear is that the survey they took is legit and it is sadly eye opening OR as one person commented, “Guys, this is just a commercial for Moovweb who is trying to coin a term “Responsive Delivery”. Shameless.”
The article points out that RWD is too complex and that too much cost is associated with moving to RWD.
One of the main issues with responsive Web design is that it requires the code for a company’s existing Web assets to be completely rewritten, making the project more complex than some expected.
We didn’t really need proof that most sites have been put together like Lego’s over the years, plugging in things here, adding 3rd party software there, etc. The move to mobile is simply making these bad development decisions more visible. IT departments don’t want to admit they were wrong and I think it’s very short sighted of those involved to write RWD off:
“One of the biggest things that came out of this was that responsive Web design was viewed by the majority of the respondents as a tactical short-term solution,” said Mitch Bishop, chief marketing officer of Moovweb, San Francisco.
The comments on this post are great:
“This article is an example of what happens when non-developers write about development. Check your facts – RWD does not require companies to “rewrite their code base”. The whole point of RWD is to have one code base.
So many inaccuracies in this article, it boggles the mind.”
and this one is pretty much exactly what I thought the first time I read this garbage:
Have you lost your mind?
Responsive web design is all about the front-end. RWD itself DOES NOT require “back-end” changes unless the previous front-end and back-end code are poorly written and intertwined – and if so that is NOT the fault of RWD.
Who paid you to post this collage of gibberish, doubletalk, half-truths and outright lies?
Sigh.