I am probably an outlier in my views on responsive design, but I'm not really sold on it either. Part of the reason is that, again, I think content is more tied to layout than people acknowledge. Also, I haven't really seen a compelling implementation of responsive design.
Most of the time, I see responsive sites hiding the site nav into a pull down menu and smashing, say, a three column layout into a single column. There are also responsive sites that outright selectively hide some content on some devices.
Hiding content implies that either the content isn't that important in the first place or that a diminished experience will be delivered to a particular device. Neither of these seems desirable.
Likewise, smashing a multi-column layout into a single column is also frequently a suboptimal user experience. In these scenarios, at least one column is usually more akin to nav, which means the user must now scroll past an entire column of nav to get to content or vice-versa. In effect, the layout change has altered the meaning of the content.
So, in general, to really deliver an optimal experience per device (if device specificity is even truly required in the first place), I believe it's worthwhile to consider different sites per device. Responsive design is a compromise that tempts devs into a "reuse" approach but, in truth, neither the required CSS nor the resulting output are optimal. So, the user experience suffers and the code isn't a lot of fun to write or maintain.
In other words, the more you want to thoughtfully vary the layout per device versus, say, just cramming everything into a single column, the more CSS you'll have to write. At some point, the volume and hackiness begs for a separate-site solution. To avoid this, responsive design just sacrifices the user experience instead.
The last part of this is that responsive design feels like a kludge aimed at solving a transient problem that is increasingly being solved by better hardware and interface design at the device/browser level. For instance, bigger and more readable displays on mobile devices, combined with pinching plus auto-zoom and auto-sizing by mobile browsers means that full desktop sites are generally very presentable on mobiles now.
In that regard, responsive design feels like WAP did years ago. Smartphones with full browsers, increased bandwidth, etc. killed the need for WAP in short order. IMO, responsive design will ultimately go the same route and has already to some extent. I, for one, already request the desktop site on all of my devices and much prefer the experience.
Most of the time, I see responsive sites hiding the site nav into a pull down menu and smashing, say, a three column layout into a single column. There are also responsive sites that outright selectively hide some content on some devices.
Hiding content implies that either the content isn't that important in the first place or that a diminished experience will be delivered to a particular device. Neither of these seems desirable.
Likewise, smashing a multi-column layout into a single column is also frequently a suboptimal user experience. In these scenarios, at least one column is usually more akin to nav, which means the user must now scroll past an entire column of nav to get to content or vice-versa. In effect, the layout change has altered the meaning of the content.
So, in general, to really deliver an optimal experience per device (if device specificity is even truly required in the first place), I believe it's worthwhile to consider different sites per device. Responsive design is a compromise that tempts devs into a "reuse" approach but, in truth, neither the required CSS nor the resulting output are optimal. So, the user experience suffers and the code isn't a lot of fun to write or maintain.
In other words, the more you want to thoughtfully vary the layout per device versus, say, just cramming everything into a single column, the more CSS you'll have to write. At some point, the volume and hackiness begs for a separate-site solution. To avoid this, responsive design just sacrifices the user experience instead.
The last part of this is that responsive design feels like a kludge aimed at solving a transient problem that is increasingly being solved by better hardware and interface design at the device/browser level. For instance, bigger and more readable displays on mobile devices, combined with pinching plus auto-zoom and auto-sizing by mobile browsers means that full desktop sites are generally very presentable on mobiles now.
In that regard, responsive design feels like WAP did years ago. Smartphones with full browsers, increased bandwidth, etc. killed the need for WAP in short order. IMO, responsive design will ultimately go the same route and has already to some extent. I, for one, already request the desktop site on all of my devices and much prefer the experience.