When we talk about web design in 2017, we’re really talking about responsive web design. In just over six years, the term ‘responsive’ has become an all pervasive industry standard. It‘s obvious that responsive web design is the process of designing a site, or a web app, so that its content adjusts appropriately according to the device it’s viewed on.

But responsive design is not without its problems. By definition, responsive designs ‘respond’ to viewport size, not content. Container-based variations on CSS media queries have been mooted as a solution, but so far are just a post-it on someone’s whiteboard. Design is broadly about relationships between elements, and those relationships are restricted on a small screen. Furthermore because our markup is semantically structured, relationships designed for mobile are frequently transposed onto much larger viewports.

Responsive design may simply be an idea that’s further ahead of its time that we realise, and once tools like CSS variables, and container-queries are implemented, design on the web will become diverse once again.