[theme-reviewers] Theme requirements for adaptive vs. responsive themes

[Bruce Wampler]

I don't think it is possible for a theme to decide using CSS only whether
or not to include specific content to be downloaded to the  browser. It can
decide whether or not to display the content, agreed. I brought this up
because of a user who had this exact problem. The site in question had some
large images to display - and the user wanted to display them by default on
desktop sites. But on mobile, where even a 100K image could significantly
impact site load time on a phone, the user wanted to prevent downloading
the large image completely, and display alternate content on the phone.

The latest info I was able to find says only Opera Mobile will use
display:none; to prevent the actual image from downloading, so CSS is not a
solution to this issue. CSS does a lot, but not everything.

And while you can likely use CSS only for adaptive mobile design, my take
on it is that most adaptive sites use user agents to detect mobile devices.

And I will always contend that there is a very large percentage of
WordPress site builders who are totally capable of making their own
decisions to use whatever options they want to build a site that works how
they want - even to the level of understanding what adaptive rendering is,
and a desire to optimize the mobile user experience by reducing load time
on phone with a slow connection. Maybe you all have state of the art 4G
phones and service, but there are plenty of people still with 2G and other
slow connections, and load speed is still important.

As a theme designer, I'm just not smart enough to know when to generate or
not generate an <img> (or song, or video, or...) for a mobile device, and
exactly what alternative to provide. As a site designer, I would know that
much more exactly, and would like my theme to allow me that ability.


On Sun, Aug 25, 2013 at 1:59 PM, Chip Bennett <chip at chipbennett.net> wrote:

> I don't think there's anything that *has* to be left up to a shortcode,
> even for adaptive design. The developer should make those decisions, based
> on the supported screen sizes - i.e. decisions, not options.  Making those
> decisions has nothing to do with a Theme creating or modifying content;
> rather, those decisions merely impact the *presentation* of that
> content. The implementation of those decisions can be handled in a manner
> that is 100% consistent with maintaining the presentation-vs-functionality
> segregation.
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