Seven Responsive Web Design Checkers That Aren’t

Oct. 10, 2012 - PRLog -- Yesterday on Twitter I outed seven Responsive Web Design Checkers that don’t really test #RWD:

- ipadpeek.com/

- juicecreative.co.uk/juicer/

- mattkersley.com/responsive/

- quirktools.com/screenfly/

- responsive.is/baloney.com

- theblogchecker.com/tbc-responsive/

- www.responsinator.com/

Shortly thereafter the dig me paper.li of a webdev wannabe named Simon Manning picked up my links but not my comments, leaving the impression I was praising rather than panning the posers who put them forward. This will correct young Simon’s error:

What most of the seven checkers above basically do is render your web page source in “iFrames” with widths set to match the screen resolutions of popular tablet and mobile devices such as the slave-produced Apple iPad and iPhone. That might show you how your media queries, fluid grids and flexible images render within a given iframe in a given browser of a given version, but that is not the same as showing you how your web pages will render on actual iOS, Android or other mobile devices. Why? Because…

iFrames are not iPhones!

#RWD testers that ignore things like device and capability detection via user agent strings and DDRs (device description repositories) give you virtual but not reality. We have website templates with fixed headers on standard browsers but not on tablet or mobile. None of the checkers above reflected that. We have web pages where the title text for standard and mobile browsers is not the same. None of these checkers reflected that. We have blogs which show the same content in different themes for standard versus smartphone browsers. None of these checkers reflected that. We have URLs which redirect no-so-smart phones from web page content they can’t handle to smaller W3C mobileOK pages they can. And none of these checkers reflected that, either.

I could go on, but do I need to?

Forget these charlatan checkers. If truly responsive web design is what you seek, then mobile friendly web 3.0 front-end development is what need. If you want broad accessibility, your web page source will have to pass meaningful validations.

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Miami web designer and Mobile Web developer Bruce Arnold's http://WebReDesignMiami.com (305-597-8340) and http://Web3.0DesignMiami.com (786-838-0851) form a responsive web design (#RWD) and Semantic Web development boutique that defines success on the Web as high visibility plus broad accessibility. Their HTML5/CSS3 websites are custom handcoded PHP/MySQL with unobtrusive Javascript and jQuery, and pass seven tests of Web 3.0 Readiness as to content, format, behavior, accessibility, semantics, syndication and links. Maximum online marketing ROI is assured by a http://PervasivePersuasion.com (786-326-8079) methodology that encompasses both search and social media marketing. Para ayuda en espanglish llame al 305-517-3851.