A decade of responsive design

Time flies. Apparently even on the web. Ten years have passed since Ethan Marcotte coined the term responsive web design in his now-classic article for A List Apart. Ten years in Internet time is roughly somewhere between the Renaissance and the invention of fire.

I first wrote about responsive design in 2011, a year after Marcotte’s article. At the @media conference in London that same year, I remember hearing the occasional mention of media queries. They were interesting, slightly exotic things lurking at the edges of conversation, not yet the sacred incantations every front-end developer was expected to know.

Then the tiny screens took over. A decade later, responsive design no longer feels revolutionary. It’s plumbing. Infrastructure. Something you simply expect to work, and become disproportionately irritated about when it doesn’t.

Which, for a technology that started as a rather elegant response to an increasingly messy web, is probably the clearest sign that it won.