W4 Readings
What We Mean When We Say “responsive”

When we say responsive, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what we mean. The definition of “responsive” is always evolving, as is many things. This is due to the fact that the web is continuously changing, and words have different meaning and uses, as well as changing over time. Primarily, there are two terms of responsiveness that are used interchangeably when talking about responsiveness. They are Responsive Web Design and “responsive”. According to the article, Responsive Web Design is constrained to the three specific techniques for making sites that adapt well across many browser environments: fluid layouts, flexible images (and media objects), and media queries. Responsive Web Design’s great impact has been greatly informed by the conceptual notion of designing and building usable, broadly supported sites and apps now and in the future, as screen sizes and widths continue to develop. The term ”responsive” has a hard time being defined. It is continuously evolving, as it is an abstract concept. A universally-accepted meaning is quite hard to pinpoint as it changes so much wherever and whenever one uses it. This is as it is a word whose genesis lacked unified intent. However, most people are moving in the direction of the same general thing when they describe something being “responsive”. Clarity in this term will eventually be clear. Another big main difference between “responsive” and Responsive Web Design is that “responsive” is an abstract modifier and generalization, while Responsive Web Design is a concrete, technical noun phrase. Eventually as these words continue to evolve, as does the world and the internet, “responsive” will become redundant. Eventually, the web will evolve to the term as just web design as all sites become responsive and it is clarifying which ones are not responsive.

What Happens When You Create A Flexbox Flex Container?

Each value of display is a combination of two things: an inner display model, and an outer display model. In order to create and use Flexbox, you need an element that will be the flex container in your html and in your CSS, you use display: flex. When we add display: flex, we are really defining display: block flex. The outer display type of our flex container is block and acts like a block level element in normal flow while the inner display type is flex, so items directly inside our container will participate in the flex layout. Another form of flex is inline flex. Display: inline flex is a flex container that acts like an inline level element, with children that participate in flex layout. The children of the inline flex container behave in the same way that children of the block flex container behave. The main difference is how the container itself behaves in the overall layout. This thought process can be applied to any box in CSS. One can ask themselves how this element acts, how the children act, and the answers will be found in how their outer and inner display models. Different properties that are useful for flexbox include flex-direction. The initial value of the flex-direction property is row, so if nothing is set, the webpage will automatically have rows. Other values for flex-direction include column, Row-reverse, column-reverse.Column is pretty straight forward, while Column-reverse and row-reverse flip it in opposite order (or reversed). Understanding the main and cross axis is another important property of Flexbox as it is not tied to the physical dimensions of the screen and understanding the fact that a row or a column can run in different physical directions is helpful. Overall flex layouts are flexible and try to make smart choices with the layouts of the content. They are writing aware, allow for alignment, and can choose how space is distributed.

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