Who's Practicing Responsive Design

Responsive design catalog MediaQueri.es has been circulating around for a while now. One of the best parts of the survey content they've curated there is the analysis -- which is misleadingly referred to as tag frequency -- outlining what technologies are being used to satisfy responsive design features.

This is a great catalog but hopefully one with a limited life span assuming that device agnostic web design will be a requirement for all digital publication eventually. Given that, knowing what type of sites are actually employing this technology as a trend is also a good measure of the maturity of the Responsive Design concept -- is it just web design professionals, or are eCommerce sites, publishers and other classifications of web properties seeing the value of this approach to web design?

Mediaqueri.es catalogs over 130 sites, which is a bit much to classify by hand. Also, assuming that the adoption of Responsive Design techniques will increase exponentially in the near future, managing the categorization of these sites manually is not really an option. To solve my immediate need for classification with a solution that will can scale with the amount of data (sites cataloged), I needed a way to classify each site dynamically.

The Analysis:

A quick and dirty script was developed to scrape the MediaQueri.es site. It pulled a list of URLs for each domain cataloged. This was very easy thanks to the clean markup on MediaQuesi.es. A bit of scrubbing to remove URLs to their sponsors (also easy as it's ad served, not hard-coded) and other non-content destinations such as Twitter.

A secondary script loads and parses the list of URLs and queries an entity extraction API to generate "sentiment tags" -- a computed summary of what a chunk of content is about.

Once we have a bag of words, any old tag-cloud can be used to provide an illustration of what responsive design web sites are actually about.

After testing a few different services including my old standby OpenCalais, I decided on a service called TagThe.net which claims to do more than create a frequency table based on word count, but doesn't seem to mention NLP anywhere. This service also takes a destination URL as an argument and saved me the trouble of scraping and organizing page content myself. Here's a pastebin of the API script.

There are several auto-tag APIs listed on Programmable Web and if I can find the time to test (and combine the output of) more of them, I might end up with a better product.

The Result:

As you can see from the tag cloud above, the Responsive Design sites cataloged my MediaQueri.es and processed by TagThe.Net seem to be about Responsive Design, or at least web design in general. It will be interesting to run this again in a month, and chart the difference.

Q: Who's practicing Responsive Design?

A: Web Designers