No offense, but with that intro to your post and the way you follow it up, you strike me as exactly the person in question who has been out of the web dev game for a bit and doesn't know how much it's progressed in the last 3 years alone.
It's not hard to do responsive design. Yes, in iOS world you can still hard code 5 layouts if you want. Those of us that have also done Android design work understand why that's untenable moving forward. I'll take relative layouts, etc and be very happy with Bootstrap/Foundation.
This made me scratch my head. Desktop apps have been accommodating multiple screen and window sizes since before the Internet existed. Do you think we hard-code a separate layout for every window size?
I don't know if responsive design is "hard" or not, but I observe that on the web, fixed widths are still incredibly common, and even major sites break easily. I visit Google, and if my window size is not at least one thousand pixels, the Sign In button is clipped and not initially visible. This would simply be considered a bug in a desktop app.
Besides, I always thought that layout was one of the weakest parts of HTML and CSS - witness the endless parade of hacks to achieve equal height columns.
As someone who is not a "web designer", but occasionally have to knock up a page or two I agree with you all 100%. To me the whole CSS business is just a big hack, and not at all usable or intuitive. YMMV, but I think there's a reason why people come up with [1] type jokes...
As someone who feels fairly proficient in CSS and also has experience with desktop application layout stuff (Swing, Qt, XAML mostly) I can say that CSS does feel like a hack. It was conceived as a (more or less) simple stylesheet language for (mostly) textual documents. By now it's used not only to style increasingly-complex document layouts but also application UIs and in that respect it definitely falls short of what other (widget-based) things could achieve for years.
It gets better with some of the CSS3 layouts which more closely mirror what's ben available in the desktop world for ages, but using those is just a recipe for »Your site looks like crap on my browser« mails because they're not standardised yet or not yet widely-implemented (or your target audience uses something else than the bleeding-edge version).
> This made me scratch my head. Desktop apps have been accommodating multiple screen and window sizes since before the Internet existed. Do you think we hard-code a separate layout for every window size?
I think the problem is the youth of today doesn't know anything other than web development, so they are full of false assumptions.
Yeah, I personally have a giggle whenever i see a complaint about catering to multiple resolutions. I seem to remember devs having similar issues with desktop games (and apps) in the whole VGA -> SVGA -> XGA migration. (1987 to 1990 ish... My dates may be off). Were none of the lessons learned then applicable to mobile dev today?
So the same coded version of Office works on your tablet and phone and the UI adapts properly? That's pretty impressive.
I wasn't implying desktop designers hard code everything -- but in fact many of them do or make assumptions that the app will NEVER be used on anything smaller than even the absurdly small 800x600. We're talking about mobile apps, responsiveness, the cost/benefit of targetting multiple devices with one app vs six native apps.
Neither Microsoft Office nor Google Docs "just worked" on tablets and phones without major reworking of their UIs. It's not obvious that the web has any advantage here - I just now visited docs.google.com and was encouraged to "download the Google Drive iOS app" so that I can "edit documents." (!)
If you target multiple platforms with one app, you get an app that works from OK to poorly on lots of platforms. Look at Light Table as an example: done entirely via web technologies, easy to port everywhere, but feels incredibly alien and _wrong_ on my Mac. (No offense Chris!)
Compare to Sublime Text 2, which to my understanding has lots of platform-specific code to make it feel native on each platform, but also a shared core (using Cairo, etc). So "six native apps" need not cost anywhere near six times a single native app.
So in the end, the cost of targeting multiple platforms with a single app is surely lower than targeting each platform individually, but that's just a classic cost/quality tradeoff - the web limits your polish. And what good is having your app on multiple platforms if it's inferior to native alternatives on all of them? I know as a Mac user, I'll pick the Mac app that feels like a Mac app every time.
It's not hard to do responsive design. Yes, in iOS world you can still hard code 5 layouts if you want. Those of us that have also done Android design work understand why that's untenable moving forward. I'll take relative layouts, etc and be very happy with Bootstrap/Foundation.