What factors other than ” smaller screens ” do we require Responsive Web Design (RWD) to solve ?

Ethan Marcotte, the man who initiated this “Responsive Web Design” thing, presented an interesting cautionary advise to the frontend web development community last week.

“Simply adjust the screensize on all devices and thats it you’re done with Responsive Web Design”.

Well according to Ethan adjusting the screensize for all devices is only 1/3rd of the equation Responsive Web Design solves while evaluating user experience on all devices. Furthermore he points out other factors which adjusting screen sizes alone cannot determine:

* Whether if a browser is running on a mobile device or not.

* Whether if Network connections are good (fast) or bad (slow) as there’s still no relationship between screen size and bandwidth.

* Whether if a device supports touch, call-making, or other capabilities.

Apart from the above the frontend web development team at Toobler would also like to add our concern and that is isnt this the best time to define “above the fold” ( Height Media Queries ) for adjusting screensize for bigger screens ? ( wondering why is that ux engineers are ignoring the bigger screens ? who said they are obsolete. Also its a trend these days where content is minimal and simple) in the RWD process. (Incase you’re wondering what is this “above the fold” thing ? Well, If you have this habit of reading newspaper early morning, you’ve already seen it. Newspaper is often delivered folded and every curator in a news publishing agency needs to decide what news needs to be published above the fold. This should be applicable to design)

Our curator who works aside our frontend web development team at Toobler thinks we also need to define “above the fold” when evaluating screensizes for bigger screen and our layout will need to scale in and scale out depending on the screensize. Though this is a skeuomorphic technique. We strongly believe minimal content infact invariably drives user experience.

Did that make sense ?. Looking forward to hear your thoughts.