Really good article! There's too many designers calling their work responsive when they only work on desktop and a couple of Apple devices. It's much better to design your CSS breakpoints around the content instead, so you can be sure it looks good at every size.
At the begining, a responsive website was build around media queries.
Then it was media queries and a fluid grid.
Then it was media queries and a fluid grid and mobile first.
Now it's media queries and a fluid grid and mobile first and built around the content.
Tomorrow what ?
Meanwhile, responsive websites are as crappy as non responsive one, but 2x heavier because of the crazy CSS and all the async js.
If you can't detect the internet speed of your user, you can't make responsive websites, period. That's why the only good responsive websites are the text-content-only websites.
Sure the generally accepted 'right way' is constantly evolving, but progress is a always a good thing.
I'm not sure about your other points, I see no reason why a responsive site should be 2x heaver in file size than its non-responsive equivalent, after all it's only a few more bytes of CSS. The increase you're seeing is probably more to do with large JS libraries and in the case of the linked article, many large images.
> Really good article! There's too many designers calling their work responsive when they only work on desktop and a couple of Apple devices.
It's good. Perhaps the inclination to tag "really good" is because of the trendy pictures?
But really, Simon's article/presentation/rant is presented as responsive design within a framework that is mobile-first. And the body of his works shows a distinctly mobile-first perspective. Which is not bad, but is also not necessarily responsive.
Really good responsive design gives an optimized desktop experience, and gracefully degrades to smaller screens. --OR-- Really good responsive design gives an optimized mobile experience, and gracefully expands for larger screens.
