It's the new buzzword for "This is how things should have been in 1994 but we were too busy trying to reimplement Quark-style rigid layout in HTML, sorry about those wasted 20 years."
I can't upvote this enough. Web 1.0 was "responsive" in that text reflowed and you could layout tables to keep things roughly positioned relative to each other. But everyone in the design community had just got used to desktop publishing and tried to replicate that, frequently with horrible results.
well, other than a table cell can't drop down below the previous elements of its row if the viewport width shrinks past certain points.
What I mean is that tables are not "responsive" and laying things out with tables, while "easy" was not enough for anything more than people browsing the web on CRTs, and certainly not for thousands of different displays with varying dimensions and resolutions.
Things are good these days. You can still use tables if that's as far as you want to go, or you can do things professionally.
This is very funny if you think of it. "Responsive" uses columns (like the 960.gs grid). Column-based designs have been around in old school print for centuries.
Wasted? We're only here because of where we came from. Even if we somehow did responsive design from the beginning (although I recall "progressive enhancement" was a hot thing back in the early days) we would just have a whole different set of hindsight-is-20/20 lessons.
> Wasted? We're only here because of where we came from...we would just have a whole different set of hindsight-is-20/20 lessons.
While that's true, I think the OP's point was we knew that emulating the old rigid model was the right thing to do and that the hindsight-is-20/20 lessons we would have had are ones that we instead will need another decade or so to obtain. We lost a lot of time.
The reason for this is understandable and depressing. Frankly most designers were far less flexible than the programmers, and preferred to rest on their own experiences rather than take advantage of the medium.
Frankly the thing that crystalized this for me was the "Cluetrain manifesto". What it said was blindingly obvious to so many of us. What shocked (and enlightened) me is that someone realized that it had to be written down. In other words most people, or at least most people in marketing and business, actually didn't understand the web and preferred to try to treat it as some sort of TV remote control with a buy button.
Of course path dependency is probably the defining factor in technical and social progress. But it doesn't mean there wasn't a missed opportunity. In fact "responsive design" is simply a minor surface metonymic element of a major missed opportunity.
The term specifically refers to a "dark" period in Europe. E.g. Islamic science famously flourished at these same centuries.
But it's increasingly seen as a misnomer wrt. Europe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)