When we started the responsive refactoring of BBC News, one of the core strategies was to take performance really seriously (super serious). Because of this we decided to use a collection of micro JavaScript libraries instead of a monolithic one. But that was in 2011, and this month we made a change you may find odd.

Here’s a quick overview of our strategy for delivering images into a responsive web page. I didn’t want to add to the debate on responsive images, as its already a well documented topic, but recent industry chatter means we need to clarify our position.

A few weeks ago we blogged about our browser support and how we bootstrap our JavaScript. The post was called “Cutting the mustard” and it got me 5 new followers on twitter (awesome!). Matthew Pennell responded with his blog post “Throwing out the kitchen sink”.

This post isn’t strictly about responsive design but hopefully it’ll give you some insight into how you can optimise your JS to help support the goals of a responsive site.

Here’s what we’ve been working on for the past few months – m.bbc.co.uk/news.

Here’s the technical stack we’ve used to build responsive news. Nb. BBC is a large(ish) organisation so we’ve already got a fully operational platform upon which to write applications, so I’ve not listed every last thing, just the tools and technology that we’ve selected to create our project.

The browser is a hostile development environment and supporting a wide range of desktop browsers can be tough work. One of the immediate challenges we discovered when we first started the responsive news prototype was the large range of devices that we would have to support. It terrified us. This article is about a solution we use to alleviate this problem.

[UPDATE] We’ve found someone to fill this post, but feel free to get in touch with us about future opportunities. This position is a 3+ month contract for a UX developer on a responsive version of BBC News. BBC News serves 10m people every day, our journalists produce stories in over 30 languages. We need a talented UX developer to join our small team to help revamp the design and technology that powers the BBC News site.

If you’ve spent any time building responsive websites with fluid grids, you will have encountered the shock of seeing your beautiful portrait layout distort when viewed in landscape mode (or vice-versa.)

The exact peak date of the Hubbert curve has been predicted by many scientists but isn’t known. And anyhow, it’s not about exactness more about communicating a period of transition for the oil industry, the dependency on a status quo, the urgency in changing a collective mindset.

The early responsive design literature talked about fluidity of the layout and embracing uncertain and uneven properties of web browsers but the early pioneering efforts have stopped at responsive web design, in essence an interaction and CSS problem ignoring the other aspects of the many and varied types of http clients.

CSS for a big site is different to CSS for a small, or even medium sized-site. The way CSS was intended, when you create a new piece of functionality for your website you simply write some new CSS to style it – easy.