3. Some Big Concepts You Need to Know
3
Some Big Concepts You Need to Know
In this chapter
The web on mobile devices
The benefits of web standards
Progressive enhancement
Responsive Web Design
Accessibility
Site performance
As the web matures and the number of devices we access it from increases exponentially, our jobs as web designers and developers get significantly more complicated. Frankly, there’s a lot more going on out there than I can fit in this book. In the chapters that follow, I will focus on the basic building blocks of web design—HTML elements, CSS styles, a taste of JavaScript, and web image production—that will give you a solid foundation for the further development of your skills.
Before we get to the nuts and bolts, I want to introduce some Big Concepts that every web designer needs to know. We’ll look at ideas and concerns that inform our decisions and contribute to the contemporary web environment. I’ll be referring back to the terminology introduced here frequently.
The heart of the matter is that as web designers, we never know exactly how the pages we create will be viewed. We don’t know which of the dozens of browsers might be used, whether it is on a desktop computer or something more portable, how large the browser window will be, what fonts are installed, whether functionality such as JavaScript is enabled, how fast the internet connection is, whether the pages are being read by a screen reader, and so on. The Big Concepts in this chapter are ...
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