Responsive Web Design
Written on Mar 5, 2026
If you're old enough, you can remember what the worldwide web looked like before responsive web design became a priority. For mobile phones, it was ugly and the font was tiny. If you're looking at this website on a mobile phone right now, you know it's not like that anymore.
I've used a single-column layout for years because it's simple and works for every screen size. I've also been using calculated font and padding sizes ever since I first learned about them. It makes web design almost effortless.
Responsive Font Size
I don't remember exactly when I discovered Matthew James Taylor's responsive font size calculation because he's rewritten the article since then. It was before December of 2023, when I started my previous blog because I was already using it at that time.
I discovered another article on this topic at Jim Fisher's website in 2024. His calculation uses a different approach in making the font sizes fluid. After testing both, I prefer Matthew James Taylor's approach.
Responsive Padding
Matthew James Taylor published a later article about responsive padding, margins, and gutters, and I started using his responsive padding calculation as soon as I figured out how to implement it.
My cascading style sheet is so small, it doesn't make sense to try and minify it. I started with normalize.css, removed everything I would never use (and all the comments), and worked from there.
If you view the source of this page, you should notice how lean it is. I'm not interested in adding code to make my articles appear better on social media sites.
Because I use relative URLs instead of absolute URLs for my internal links, I can test and view any changes I make on my PC before I run my deploying script and upload the compiled pages to Cloudflare.
Images by Matthew James Taylor