Is there an alternative to media queries for responsive design?
20th July 2013
My answer to Is there an alternative to media queries for responsive design? on Quora
Yes: use percentage measurements for your layout components. That way you can build a website that works on a much larger range of screen sizes. You can combine this approach with media queries—for example, you could specify that your site has a 25% wide navigation menu and a 75% wide content area on devices that are wider than 400px, but any smaller than that and it collapses to a single column layout with the menu hidden and accessible only through a menu bar icon.
More recent articles
- Highlights from my appearance on the Data Renegades podcast with CL Kao and Dori Wilson - 26th November 2025
- Claude Opus 4.5, and why evaluating new LLMs is increasingly difficult - 24th November 2025
- sqlite-utils 4.0a1 has several (minor) backwards incompatible changes - 24th November 2025