Doing Things Wrong

Web Design

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I coded up a pretty spiffy popup menu system for small displays like phones and tablets. If you're on a small device, you get it automatically. You can force it on a large display by making the window narrow.

Also, time for a rant. The people who came up with 'responsive web design' are a bunch of idiots. It doesn't work. It can't work, and there is a simple reason:

There is no way to detect the real-world physical size of the display. You cannot get the physical size of the screen your end-user has eyeballs on. Without that, everything else is pointless. Nor is there any reliable way to detect a touch screen, and nowadays even if you could it wouldn't mean much - everything is a touch screen now.

Perhaps someday browser software will have access to dpi, or maybe even the actual physical dimensions of the display. Together with screen pixels and a little math, that might finally give you a way to design a website so that, say, the font size doesn't shrink away to nothing on a phone. On the other hand, with virtual pixels, and 4k Retina displays, and lord-knows-what-is-to-come, I doubt "responsive web design" will ever work right.

The current paradigm of responsive web design is completely wrong. However, a bit of that wrongness can be used to get a desirable result, and that is what I have done here. Web gurus will howl, and Gargle analytics complains about it, but it works.

Gargle wasted no time in sending me this hate-mail. Funny for them to be telling the world how to code, Gargle has always had the worst web developers anywhere. They are just really, really BAD.


Yet another feature of WordPress that really doesn't work well is the Media Library. The problem is when you have a great many images, it really bogs down and becomes very difficult to find anything. To make it run faster, set the thumbnail size to 200x200, and use the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin to do what it says. This will result in true thumbnails that will load almost as fast as you can scroll.

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