In a nutshell responsive design have been created to enable websites to be readable and user friendly regardless what what device it is being viewed on. A grid layout allows developers to create website designs by using rows and colounms, which can easily adapt and manipulate depending on what sized device the user is using, and depending on the orietation of the device.
Most webpage designs follow suit with printed literture, and features are broken down into rows and colunms. This makes it easier for the eyes to break down infomation. and scan quicker.
The grid system is broken down into 12 colunms. We can not give each column a pixel size, as this would not allow use on difference sized devices, instead we use a percentage and specifiy in our stylesheet the percentage width of 1 colunm, and that of 2 colunms, and that of 3 colunms, and so on up to 12 colunms being 100%.
Following the principles of responsive design basically means your website isn’t fixed to a single size, which means your page will resize and responde, and will still be viewed as the designer intended, and be user firendly on any device. Boom! Happy days!
Semantic Structure is a principle applied to any language, human or computer. Semantic structure of code as evolved over time, to contiune to be relevent and helps all users of code to navigate markup with ease, and build documents with logical structure. At a high level the aim of good semantic structure is for machines to make sense of our human content
An intresting concept to think about is not only how we have evolved responsive design due to the amount of different devices we now have to view the web, but also how we use them. As the general consumer rapidly moves away from desktop machines to tablets, phones, and notepads we need to consider that we physically use these things differently. Here comes 'adaptive design'. Adaptive design considers how we now use our thumbs for scrolling and not a mouse, and therefore we must evolve code in a new way once more.