Scale and adapt: A story of how we built Responsive BBC News
summary
Builds a responsive BBC News front end that actually ships: mobile‑first core at ~30KB, progressive enhancement via a conservative feature gate (uses querySelector to decide the cuts the mustard test and serve jQuery 2 without Sizzle), on‑the‑fly image resizing service to avoid huge downloads, batching and lazy strategies to reduce HTTP requests, a 10s GPRS performance budget, heavy caching with Varnish and CDN fallback, HAR logging for performance, and tooling like Sass, AMD modules and PhantomJS plus Cucumber/Capybara for automated regression tests. Unexpected scale: 1 billion smartphones vs five times as many basic phones.
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chapters (22)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:53Back in 2008
- 1:45Mobile
- 6:24Responsive Design
- 7:23Browser Support
- 8:43Simple Site
- 8:58Building Blocks
- 9:12Content First
- 9:48Mobile First
- 10:55Cuts the Mustard Test
- 11:48Browser Differences
- 13:56Performance
- 16:33Images
- 19:01Image Tags
- 19:51Media Queries
- 22:03Complexity
- 26:46Hiding content
- 32:13Testing
- 37:57Varnish
- 41:37John
- 41:53Getting buyin
- 49:11User expectations
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