For a long time the industry standard tool for generating animated and interactive web content has been Flash.

The vast majority of animated content on the web including banners, intro sequences, ads, cartoons and even some navigation elements have traditionally been developed in Flash.

However - things have started to change over the past couple of years.

1) Apple rained on Adobe's parade by refusing to support Flash on iPhones and iPads - rendering any Flash content invisible to users of these devices (when over half a billion people are using mobile devices to browse the web - that's a big deal!)

2) The latest web standards including HTML5 & CSS3 and  JavaScript libraries like jQueryare enabling developers to produce animated content that is more accessible and has faster load times than Flash

3) More and more browsers are now supporting HTML5 and CSS3

So if you can develop animated content that contains the same functionality as Flash, but will load faster and display properly on ALL browsers - what is the future for Flash...?

Enter Adobe Edge!

Responsive web design is vital for making sure your visitors get as great an experience on their mobile as their desktop while browsing your site.

Our tutorials often aim at the beginner end of the scale, but this week we're going for something a bit more advanced. In this tutorial our HTML5 & CSS3 trainer Giselle explains how to convert navigation to a dropdown menu for smaller screens using CSS3 media queries.

This is one of the topics covered on our Mobile Web Design Week which combines our HTML5 & CSS3 Course with JavaScript training to give you a tool kit for designing mobile sites and also teaches you a best practice approach for responsive web design.

This tutorial assumes a familiarity with responsive web design and using CSS3 media queries to create different sets of styles for mobile devices. Click the links to find out more.

You do not have to test this in a mobile device. To test in your browser, simply resize your screen to the required width.

Why Convert to a Dropdown Menu?

If you have more than three buttons in your main navigation your menu will wrap or overlap when you decrease the width of your web page to fit it to a smaller mobile device screen. A popular method to get around this is to convert your menu to a dropdown. Other alternatives are to use display: block, or to use JavaScript or JQuery to toggle a menu when an icon or button is clicked on. Using display: block is a simple and quick way to style navigation for mobile dropdowns but won't work for menus with many links in them. Using JQuery to toggle the menu requires some knowledge of JQuery and JavaScript. Which method you use will depend on the particular site you are working on. This tutorial shows you how to use the first method and is quick and simple to implement.

Responsive Web Design is happening right now, it has hit the mainstream and will be around for quite a while. Once you've been on our Responsive Web Design course, there are a huge number of online tools to help you switch to a responsive design workflow and develop your skills and your sites even further. In this post, we're going to run through some of the best.

Responsive Design Workflow: You’re Going to Need a lot, Less Paper!

Workflows are changing with responsive design: there’s less reliance on mock-ups and more emphasis on HTML and CSS prototypes. Although these take longer initially, iterations in response to client feedback are much quicker as they can be done live. Responsive design heavily supports CSS instead of graphics wherever possible, meaning that the majority of tweaks will be made in the style sheet.

Read the case studies below to see what’s involved:

Luke Wroblewski - An Event Apart: The Responsive Designer’s Workflow

MEric Bidelman - Mobifying Your HTML5 Site

Wireframing Templates

Wireframes now need to include a range of devices, as well as consider how easy it is for the user to tap on areas of the screen. These free templates enable you to sketch your design on actual size, pre-created templates for seven mobile platforms.

CSS3 and HTML5 are changing the way we use the web, and how programmers and web designers build sites. Web browsers are quickly becoming compatible with HTML5 and CSS3's new tags and features, which are opening up a whole new world of possibilities.

One of those possibilities is the use of Responsive Web Design. In a world where mobile web browsing is ubiquitous, Responsive Web Design techniques allow designers to use flexible grids and page layouts in sites that will respond to user behaviour and adjust automatically to the user's browser capabilities and screen resolution of their device (meaning you don't have to make a different version of your site for every mobile phone and tablet out there). We'll be writing more about Responsive Web Design here soon (so watch this space!)

In response to the increase in demand for these skills we're now running regular HTML5 & CSS3 Training courses here in Brighton - the two 1-day workshops are scheduled together and can be booked together as a package. We're also running regular JavaScript Training and jQuery Training courses.

To give you an idea of some of the exciting new things you can do with CSS3 - here's our favourite 5 new features in CSS3, along with links to relevant CSS3 Examples.

Top 5 New Features in CSS3

1) Border-radius

The new border-radius feature in CSS3 comes as a great relief for anyone who has had to create rounded corners with corner images and extra DIVs: all you need is a few lines of CSS. It's not yet supported by IE7 and IE8, but you can use a CurvyCorners Script for these browsers.

CSS3 Border Radius Example

In this post, our responsive web design trainer Giselle guides you through the differences between Media Types and Media Queries with regards to modern web design.

Media queriesis a new module in the CSS3 W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) specification. Media Queries combine the older Media Types, which target a particular media type - e.g. a screen - with conditions that must be met by a particular device in order for a set of styles to be applied to it - e.g. the width of a screen. Media queries enable you to change the appearance of your site for different devices while the HTML remains the same (although some of it may be hidden).

You can learn more about Media Queries in ourResponsive Web Design training.

Media Types

In the CSS2 specification Media Types targeted different devices but did not allow you to differentiate between devices of the same type but with different physical characteristics, e.g. two mobile phones with different screensizes.

Stylesheets for specific media were specified in the

of a page,

Orwithin a style sheet,

@media print {

body {

font-size: 12pt;

}

}

Other difficulties with Media Types included the fact that early mobile device browsers ignored them for the most part and later browsers defaulted to screen-based style sheets.

Check out this article for more information on Media Types.

Today (and forevermore!), to ensure that your website is truly accessible to all of your users, you have to make sure that your design works for a huge range of mobile devices - iPhones, iPads, Blackberries etc etc... all with different browsers and screen resolutions (many of which are now in 'portrait' orientation, as opposed to the traditional 'landscape' web browser)

One way of doing this is to design a different version of your site for every device - however that's a lot of work.

Enter Responsive Web Design..

What is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive Web design is an approach to web design that ensures that your site responds to your user’s environment, and to their behaviour, based on a range of variables including screen size, platform and orientation.

Rather than create multiple versions of a site for each device - ONE website design will be suitable for all users, by using flexible layouts, images and CSS techniques including media queries. The website adjusts itself to the user - rather than the other way round.

HTML5 and CSS3 are an important part of responsive web design, and as more and more browsers begin to support these technologies responsive websites will become more popular.