Peter Chamberlin

@pgchamberlin

A brief history of Responsive News

LdnWebPerf - 8th December 2015, pt1

As endorsed by @souders :)

 Responsive News

 Innovative RWD

Tom Maslen

@tmaslen

"The increasing popularity of mobile web browsing, and the availability of responsive web design has forced my team to refactor how we think a modern webpage should be built."

Cutting the Mustard

Mark McDonnell

@integralist

"Here at BBC News we have found this approach provides us a good flexible foundation to incorporate responsive images without resorting to un-stable and un-implemented official solutions or polyfills."

Imager.js

David Blooman

@dblooman

"The amount of time spent testing for CSS regressions can be lengthy if you don't automate, looking at devices and different browser resolutions can be a drag on testing.

By using this tool, we have cut our testing time down dramatically..."

Wraith

We made it

John Cleveley

@jcleveley

"After almost 4 years, 5000 pull requests from 50 contributors, we’ve migrated the BBC News site to a totally new stack. We now have a single code base for all devices, in 30 different languages thanks to RWD."

Responsive to all users - March 2015

 Election 2015

 Award winners

2015 -Team of the year

 Performance is integral

  • Cutting the mustard
  • Progressive enhancement w/ AJAX
  • Only download what you will use
  • Make the page usable as early as possible
  • Avoid DOM redraws

"Moving Swiftly" - Maslen, 2012

 Growing pains

  • Desktop parity on /news
  • Roll out to 32 sites, in 27 languages
  • Advertising for international visitors
  • Two navigation strategies

Difficult problems deferred

  • Desktop and Responsive teams merge
  • Development across both codebases
  • Page components we didn't control

Organisational complexity

 Performance at launch

  • We knew we had compromised speed
  • We needed visibility of the issues
  • So we undertook a performance audit

A brief history of Responsive News

By Peter Chamberlin

A brief history of Responsive News

A performance-focused primer on the BBC's Responsive News project. Written for LdnWebPerf, 8th Dec 2015.

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