Also keep in mind not all browsers (or sites) are equal on zoom… Case in point at the 960 width I run the browser at with the custom CSS applied to this site, in Opera, I can zoom to 200% and not even get a scrollbar and that’s with the fonts already bumped up 25% by the user.css… and what’s the scrollbar lead to? NOTHING!!! Big empty gray area – it’s the fault of certain elements in the layout being poorly designed and missing end tags in the markup. Opera pretty much will make the content fit, and is a BILLION times smarter at it than every other browser.
@Stomme – oh noes, crappy little icons get a bit blurry resized, not that… photographs usually scale well… the only really bad thing resize-wise being when people use images instead of text… In otherwords, non-content elements or wastes of bandwidth. Big deal.
Though not all browsers are made equal at resizing images either; and whether or not it’s a big deal likely hinges on what the content is; if the important part of the page is text, who gives a flying fig what happens to the images as long as the layout doesn’t become unusable… If the content is the images… well… there might be something wrong with the content.
Why is it that needing to employ a screen reader or similar assistive technology to use a web site is an accessibility issue we should all take seriously, but needing to enlarge text only to use a site is a cause for ridicule?
Resizing JUST the text tends to break layouts – I’d probably be more friendly to the nyetscape 4 approach to content resizing if they did what IE did, and left PX alone; you resize one thing declared in px, you should resize all things declared in px… anything else is just begging for a broken page… it’s why no new browser uses the old resize method by default. It was a bad idea fifteen years ago, it’s bad idea today who’s time has come and gone.
Besides if you need text larger you probably need it that way by default, which is why we should be designing in %/em and letting the user decide. If the user even has to dive for the zoom in the first place, you’ve probably already shtupped the proverbial puppy design-wise.
See the default skin for this forum with everything declared in PX… which I’m STILL having to override with user.css
You mean badly designed layouts. I also have my browser set just to resize text, because I often find the text too small, yet I don’t want the whole site blown up at the same time. If the layout isn’t designed to handle increased font sizes, won’t it just fail anyway if someone—like you—has system fonts set larger than the default? If so, then browser zoom is a fool’s paradise for many a web designer.
My thoughts, too. I use FF as my default browser, but I when I test sites in other browsers, I want to be able to test them at various font sizes. The point of setting font-size 100% is to accommodate the user’s default, whatever that may be.
Actually, no. Sometimes I do have to zoom because of some lousy design, but mostly I have to zoom because I’m having a bad day and therefore having more difficulty than usual in reading. If there’s one thing I can’t do, ever, not even on the very best of days, it’s scan from the end of one line to the start of the next without being able to see both ends at the same time. So, if I’ve enlarged my text to make it readable, I do not want a scroll bar to make reading it impossible.
All we’re asking is to have “Zoom Text Only” as a browser option for those who prefer it. Why is that so controversial?
Yes, at some times of day I like to have text bigger—like at night, when I don’t feel like sitting upright. Say I’m reading an article on A List Apart: I like to bump up the text size several times, lean back in the chair and read at a distance (preferably with a glass of wine ) I love having the text bigger but the lines the same width as before. That’s my ideal, rather than big, long lines that make it look like I’m watching a tennis match (on this big screen).
Huh? I’d be more concerned with min-width on that… max-width is max-width… if it’s a fluid layout where’s the problem? If it’s a fixed layout and you need zoom, it’s probably a “crappy little stripe” anyways.
@Stomme – oh noes, crappy little icons get a bit blurry resized, not that… photographs usually scale well… the only really bad thing resize-wise being when people use images instead of text… In otherwords, non-content elements or wastes of bandwidth. Big deal.
Just icons wouldn’t be a problem. Buttons, logos, those useless decorative stock photos they place in the middle of articles to break up the text… all makes me sick. Photographs do scale better than originally-vector-based things, but… bleh.
It does help to block images, but again I’m doing that from Firefox: not from the browser itself the but easy one-click Web Dev ToolBar, which frankly I only use sometimes for web dev and a lot of times for surfing. Hell of a lot easier than crawling through about:conf crap.
Off Topic:
Oh and found an ASM-lover and sent him a link to your paku-paku. He was all like “Someone writes DOS games in 2011?? So cool!” haha
) I love having the text bigger but the lines the same width as before. That’s my ideal, rather than big, long lines that make it look like I’m watching a tennis match (on this big screen).