Almost a decade ago, @karenmcgrane and I were prepping for a talk about what people were optimistically calling “the mobile web.” It was going to be more complicated than that, we thought.
“Have you seen @beep’s draft?” she asked. It was, she said, going to change things.
The draft she was talking about was the first edition of Ethan Marcotte’s “Responsive Web Design.” He’s writing about the anniversary on his blog this weekend, and it’s worth reading. https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/responsive-design-at-10/
He’s the first to say that what he labeled “responsive design” wasn’t revolutionary but evolutionary; combining techniques that web standards advocates and what we now call Front End Designers had been wrestling with for a long time to solve a new kind of problem.
Despite that humble framing, it’s hard to overstate the impact that @beep has had on the world of web and digital publishing, even content management, because he did the hard work of boiling down those techniques into a set of easily-explained core practices.
Figuring out how to solve a tangly problem is a particular kind of “hard.” Figuring out how to explain it to others, clearly and unambiguously, so everyone else can solve it, too, is another kind. Massive kudos to @beep and all the whip-smart folks who’ve built on his work, too.