Should I use max-device-width or max-width?

If you use max-width, when you change the size of the browser window on your desktop, you might be shown mobile-orientated styling, such as touch-friendly elements and menus and that kind of thing.

It's shocking to me that it seems to be popular opinion that this is desirable. I haven't figured out if fluid/liquid design before mobile was considered bad for the wrong or the right reasons. It appears to me that this is just a fancier version of liquid layout, but one that designers are embracing for some reason.

When the design community at large chose to side with fixed layouts over liquid in the mid 2000s, it was because text reflows impeded legibility often resulting in widows and other typogrphical artifacts. Additionally, maintaining the codebase was often tricky from design to design to keep elements from colliding etc. The only difference between liquid layouts and responsive design is that responsive, due to better browsers and the proliferation of masonry-like frameworks make it easier to accomplish.

I personally use min/max-device-width because I prefer to follow desktop document conventions that have decades of precedence. Not all documents you open on the internet are going to behave this way on a desktop, nor are other types of documents or applications that you load on your desktop. Pages designed before the dominance of mobile, just like MS Word, Photoshop, etc. hold their scroll positions and do not change their layouts allowing users to keep track of content within the page flow when performing the unrelated task of window management.

I generally use 3 breakpoints: one for phones, one for tablet and one for desktop. The desktop and often at least the landscape portrait are fixed and the tablet portrait and below are liquid. This combination of adaptive and responsive allows the desktop to behave like a desktop site while keeping me from needed to layout 10-odd separate fixed-width mobile device layouts. The text doesn't reflow on mobile devices because the viewport can't be resized.

TL;DR

If you're making a responsive website, use min-width/max-width in your media queries rather than min-device-width/max-device-width in order to target a wider range of screen sizes.

According to the 2018 Media Queries Level 4 specification draft, the device-width media feature is deprecated. It will be kept for backward compatibility, but should be avoided.

8. Appendix A: Deprecated Media Features

To query for the size of the viewport (or the page box on page media), the width, height and aspect-ratio media features should be used, rather than device-width, device-height and device-aspect-ratio, which refer to the physical size of the the device regardless of how much space is available for the document being laid out. The device-* media features are also sometimes used as a proxy to detect mobile devices. Instead, authors should use media features that better represent the aspect of the device that they are attempting to style against.

As a side note, remember to specify a viewport meta tag in the <head> section of your document:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

Explanation

Due to all the different possible screen resolutions and pixel densities a given device can have, a pixel is not a pixel because there are several things to take into consideration (zoom, pixel density, screen resolution and size, device orientation, aspect ratio, etc..). In this case, a pixel is actually referred to as a "optical reference unit" rather than a physic hardware pixel.

Fortunately, you can specify a viewport meta tag in the <head> section of your document in order to control the width and scaling of the browser's viewport. If this tag has a content value of width=device-width, the screen's width will match the device independent pixels and will ensure that all the different devices should scale and behave consistently.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

In terms of media queries, you will probably want to use max-width rather than max-device-width, since max-width will target the viewport (current browser window), whereas max-device-width will target the device's actual full screen size/resolution.

In other words, if you are using max-device-width, you will not see different media queries applied when resizing your desktop browser, because unlike max-width, only the device's actual full screen size is taken into consideration; not the current size of the browser window.

This makes a huge difference if you're trying to create an adaptive layout because the site won't be responsive when resizing the browser. In addition, if you're using max-device-width the media queries you're using to target devices with smaller screens will not apply to desktops even when resizing the browser window down to match said smaller screen size.

As of 2018, the latest media query specification draft has actually deprecated the device-width media feature, therefore it should be avoided.

In addition, this article on Google Developers highly discourages the usage of max-device-width:

Google Developers - Web Fundamentals - Responsive CSS media queries

It is also possible to create queries based on *-device-width; though this practice is strongly discouraged.

The difference is subtle but very important: min-width is based on the size of the browser window, whereas min-device-width is based on the size of the screen. Unfortunately some browsers, including the legacy Android browser may not report the device width properly and instead report the screen size in device pixels instead of the expected viewport width.

In addition, using *-device-width can prevent content from adapting on desktops or other devices that allow windows to be resized because the query is based on the actual device size, not the size of the browser window.

Should I use max-device-width or max-width?

TL;DR

Explanation

Further Reading:

Tags:

Css

Responsive Design

Media Queries

Related

Recent Posts