Modular Responsive Web Design using Element Queries
This addresses the challenge of reusability and scalability in large responsive web applications for developers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing web specifications.
The paper tackles the problem of creating modular responsive web applications by extending Responsive Web Design to include responsive modules that adapt based on local context, independent of global constraints, and presents ELQ, which achieves speed-ups of up to 37x in core algorithms compared to previous methods.
Responsive Web Design (RWD) enables web applications to adapt to the characteristics of different devices such as screen size which is important for mobile browsing. Today, the only W3C standard to support this adaptability is CSS media queries. However, using media queries it is impossible to create applications in a modular way, because responsive elements then always depend on the global context. Hence, responsive elements can only be reused if the global context is exactly the same, severely limiting their reusability. This makes it extremely challenging to develop large responsive applications, because the lack of true modularity makes certain requirement changes either impossible or expensive to realize. In this paper we extend RWD to also include responsive modules, i.e., modules that adapt their design based on their local context independently of the global context. We present the ELQ project which implements our approach. ELQ is a novel implementation of so-called element queries which generalize media queries. Importantly, our design conforms to existing web specifications, enabling adoption on a large scale. ELQ is designed to be heavily extensible using plugins. Experimental results show speed-ups of the core algorithms of up to 37x compared to previous approaches.