HTML Responsive Web Design

What is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive Web Design is about using HTML and CSS to automatically resize, hide, shrink, or enlarge, a website, to make it look good on all devices (desktops, tablets, and phones):

Note: A web page should look good on any device!

Setting The Viewport

When making responsive web pages, add the following <meta> element in all your web pages:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">

This will set the viewport of your page, which will give the browser instructions on how to control the page's dimensions and scaling.

Responsive Images

Responsive images are images that scale nicely to fit any browser size.

Using the width Property

If the CSS width property is set to 100%, the image will be responsive and scale up and down:

<img src="img_girl.jpg" style="width:100%;">

Notice that in the example above, the image can be scaled up to be larger than its original size. A better solution, in many cases, will be to use the max-width property instead.

Using the max-width Property

If the max-width property is set to 100%, the image will scale down if it has to, but never scale up to be larger than its original size:

<img src="img_girl.jpg" style="max-width:100%;height:auto;">

Show Different Images Depending on Browser Width

The HTML <picture> element allows you to define different images for different browser window sizes.

Resize the browser window to see how the image below change depending on the width:

Flowers 

<picture>
    <source srcset="img_smallflower.jpg" media="(max-width: 600px)">
    <source srcset="img_flowers.jpg" media="(max-width: 1500px)">
    <source srcset="flowers.jpg">
    <img src="img_smallflower.jpg" alt="Flowers">
</picture>

Responsive Text Size

The text size can be set with a "vw" unit, which means the "viewport width".

That way the text size will follow the size of the browser window:

Hello World

Resize the browser window to see how the text size scales.

<h1 style="font-size:10vw">Hello World</h1>
<p style="font-size:2vw;">Resize the browser window to see how the text size scales.</p>

Viewport is the browser window size. 1vw = 1% of viewport width. If the viewport is 50cm wide, 1vw is 0.5cm.

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