I think you missed my point. The vast majority of sites that are using "responsive design" suck directly because of it. If there are frameworks that lets websites do responsive design that doesn't suck, then they are clearly not using these frameworks. It's either that or the frameworks don't actually make doing "responsive design" easy.

The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. And the responsive design puddings are, by and large, horrible eating.

There seems to be so little good news lately, that I just have to savor this for a while!

Good lord, I suck at commenting! Everything after my "that was a typo" line shouldn't be there.

That was a typo. I meant "if your visitors aren't primarily coming from search engines".

Plenty more don't.

The site discovery process is dominated by the use of Google. What site owners chose to put in their robots.txt file has nothing to do with this reality.

We live in completely separate universes. The stats I care about show Bing in second place behind Google with a whopping 2% of Google's traffic. Followed by Yahoo at 31% of Bings pathetic 2%.

I think if sites stopped caring about their Google rankings then Google's relevance would increase since people would be more likely to find what their actually interested in vs dealing with aftermath of billions locked up in efforts to p0wn google search results.

The way it fails is when Google algorithms make bad decisions based on largely irrelevant criteria.

This I agree with.

Which does nothing to address the problem of Google altering the ranking based on their estimation of how well the site works on mobile.

This is a worse solution over making a separate mobile site, because it messes up the desktop experience. There are too many sites that, when I resize my browser to whatever the site considers "mobile size", give me the mobile layout. This is terrible, terrible behavior.

If this is the case, why is it that apparently nobody is using them?

I assume that because it's the only thing that makes sense. If Google just wanted to offer single sign-on for those who like the idea, they could have made it optional rather than mandatory.

Making it mandatory strongly indicates that it was for the benefit of Google, not the users.

Into their version of the 21st century. And they want to accomplish this by degrading the search results for everyone using Google from their mobile devices.

No, that's not their criteria either. Their criteria is that the site has to adhere to a bunch of little things, like spacing between links, button sizes, etc. None of that has much to do with whether or not the page is shitty on a mobile device.

Because that would actually be useful.

That and the whole "real names" policy. I do believe that if Google hadn't tried forcing everyone into it, it would have been more popular.

But not with me. I used G+ for a while, but gave it up because of endless technical and usability problems.

He's saying that if your visitors are primarily coming from search engines, then your site can ignore what search engines want without harm because being downranked by them won't hurt you. Plenty of sites get most of their visitors from regular readers rather than from search engines.

Sites are able to choose not to use Google, by the way. It just takes a small edit to your robots.txt file to get Google to completely ignore your site.

I don't think google is a monopoly -- there are lots of other search engines who drive reasonable amounts of traffic. But they are certainly the Big Dog. Nonetheless, there is a three-way symbiotic relationship here. If Google pushes so hard that sites stop caring about their google rankings, then Google's relevance will fall. If enough people find Google to suck more than the alternatives, the Google's relevance will fall.

The beta is. Or was. I haven't looked at it in quite a while.

Yes, I agree. Designers wanting complete control over the page appearance are a plague on the face of the web. Some of the blame goes to CSS as well -- at least the earlier versions of it -- as it made it extremely difficult to have multiple columns without also requiring a fixed page width.