Design - Reloaded

Stephanie Rieger initiated the latest dust-up involving screen sizes.  The problem, as she points out, is that "Android" really isn't about one device, and one screen size - its based on a combination of

• "Actual" screen resolution
• Browser views (browsers embedded in other apps like facebook and twitter), where the "shell" sucks up some real-estate
• Settings like "Zoom"
• Viewport orientation based on portrait/landscape
• and oh, so many more things

(By the way, the article is about Android, but the same applies across iOS, RIM, etc.)

This actually takes me back to my early days in the web-world (1993, natch) - when you had only Mosaic (and Netscape 0.9 in '94) to contend with design decisions were easy.  Very shortly thereafter, life became a living hell, as you had to start designing towards various iterations of Netscape, since each version came out with its new set of HTML tags that made life so much easier, yet completely screwed the pooch if you cared about things like backwards compatibility.  (Yeah, we started ignoring Mosaic pretty early on).  And then IE came along, with its own set of tags, and there was JavaScript, and this new thing called style sheets, and, well, you get the idea.
Mind you, this was actually a good thing for those of us who were in the consulting business.  Lots of money.  Oodles of money.  dotcom money. (literally, y'know?)

The funny thing is, we had gotten really good at building out content that looked damn good on the different environments, without having to stick with a lowest common denominator, thanks to healthy doses of what eventually became fluid design (or responsive web design).  The funny thing is, quite a few of these lessons fell by the way side thanks to standardization, and people started to create content based on breakpoints based on the device width (e.g., there can be only 320px, 480px, 720px, etc.  I will pick one based on what the device tells me).
And life was good , and people sang praises unto CSS, and there was rejoicing for a new standard was upon the world, and lo there were unicorns and bluebirds and spontaneous group dancing in the streets.
Except that, as Jeffrey Zeldman points out, the plethora of viewing surfaces out there are killing this happy state of affairs

[This] is an exciting and challenging time; that fixed width layouts do not address, and adaptive layouts (multiple fixed-width layouts set to common breakpoints) do not go far enough in addressing, the challenges posed by our current plethora of mobile screen sizes, zoom settings, embedded views (i.e. “browser” windows inside app windows, often with additional chrome) and what Rieger calls “the unintended consequences” that occur as these various settings clash in ways their creators could not have anticipated.

Which brings me back to fluid design.  In the coming months/year, I expect to see content

drastically reworked, with a lot of meta-design, as designers figure out how content should be structured for environments where the viewing surface can vary drastically not just across devices, but within the device itself based on the context.
The advantage over the 90s is that we have more tools now, better tools, that can help us along in this adventure.
Exciting and challenging times indeed!

Note:  If you're wondering why my design skillz do not r00l, well, its because, well, I have none :-)  And I have plenty of people willing to vouch for this. Ask anyone who I've worked with in the last ten years about clientTool, and watch them simultaneously shudder, recoil in horror, and run away screaming...