Mobile-first Css: Advantages & Disadvantages

By Author: WEBREDAS
Total Articles: 55
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Mobile-responsible web development is the flavour of the field. It offers a user-focussed, user-friendly, feature-dense and flexible platform that overcomes the feasibility and limitations of conventional desktop-oriented websites. It’s wrong to assume that traditional websites are not user-centric but mobile websites have taken the concept way further. At this point, a pertinent question that hits our mind is if a web development company in Kolkata should think about developing mobile-first CSS. Let us delve into depth of the matter.
Classic mobile-first CSS development is guided by the basics of overwriting style declarations. But these only give rise to inefficiency and complications, which can result in code-based and increased testing requirements, neither of which sounds practically fineafter a long time.
For an individual project, you may still favour the mobile-first CSS coz it is often projected as the best tool for the purpose. But first thing first – assess if it will make a right choice in keeping with the visual details and user interactions ...
... underway. How to deal with the matter?  You certainly need inputs from a horse’s mouth i.e. a professional web developer.

What are the advantages of mobile-first CSS?
There are few reasons why mobile-first CSS development has long been the de facto method. Let us examine these:
Development Hierarchy: The most important feature to enjoy from a mobile-first methodology is a reliable development hierarchy. You only have to concentrate on mobile view and work on development requirements.
Mobile View Priority: The mobile view is undoubtedly the simplest and most important factor in the entire scenario. It incorporates all the main user journeys and often attracts a higher number of users. However, the project type also plays a role in predicting the visit percentage.
Tried & Tested: Mobile-first is a tried and tested system that has delivered results for years. It delivers solution pretty well.
Desktop-centric Development Prevention:If development work is done on desktop computers, developers usually tend to have the desktop view intheir focus. One of the advantages of mobile-first priority from the start is it saves time from switching later on. No web developers love working on reconstructing a desktop-centric site for a mobile interface.M

What are the disadvantages of mobile-first CSS?
Setting Style Declarations:Declaring setting styles and overwriting them can result in unwanted ramifications at higher breakpoints.
Increased Complexity: The higher up the breakpoint hierarchy developers go, the more code complexities from lower breakpoints they end up inheriting.
Higher CSS Specificity: This one has the potentials of becoming a big headache when you focus on keeping simplicity of the CSS selectors as much as possible.
More Regression Testing Requirements: Just like adding a new style, CSS changes at a lower view require higher breakpoints for regression testing.
No CSS Download Priority for Browser: Classic mobile-first media queries show no reliability on the browser’s capability for downloading CSS files based on priority order.

Final Words
At the end of the day, it is always up to the developers to decide regarding the mobile-first CSS methodology. If they feel comfortable and confident as well as possess strong knowledge of requirements at breakpoints, they can surely stick to classic development. For them, it is important to identify and choose common styles and exceptions so that they can be clubbed together on the relevant stylesheet.