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Re: Any official clarification on Text-only zoom and RWD?

for

From: _mallory
Date: Feb 25, 2016 9:39AM

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 02:59:15PM +0000, Alastair Campbell wrote:
> It is a good point about large images getting blurry, but I guess that on
> balance having readable text without horizontal scrolling is more important?

Depends, I guess. Now that I start getting dizzy with horizontal scrolling
it's become more important for me, but on the other hand animated gifs
scattered throughout articles are even worse when blown up, often makes
some little flickering strip on the edge of the browser show up. Bleh.
>
> Perhaps in future things like picture/srcset could keep the images clear
> even when zooming.

Now that's a cool idea!

>
> > However I also discovered that unless the website is a single column, and
> a single column only, enlarging only the text but not the containers
> fails, hard and early, once you are dealing with a language that doesn't
> have all the short simple words English has.
>
> I guess that's why you "used to" use text-sizing rather than zoom, and I
> guess you now use zoom primarily?

That, and first Opera 12 started switching to the mobile CSS if there was
any, which usually worked out *very* well, and I was using a lot of Opera
since the keyboarding is awesome. Eventually other browsers started doing
it too, so right now the browser I do Text Zoom with are FF and IE, and
when on Windows I have ZoomText so IE hasn't been zoomed in any way in
the last year or so.
Again pages which had columns always ended up with text running out of the
boxes, whereas now many pages have mobile styles with 1 col.
>
>
>
> > Also, I've run across this and the issue he shows as a demo hits again
> > languages with long words pretty quickly:
> > https://vasilis.nl/nerd/using-pixels-polite/
> >
>
> Interesting, I had thought that your browser settings would over-ride the
> pixel units anyway, I wonder if something else happens on codepen? I"ll
> investigate if I get time.

If you go into for example chromium and in the settings set to "larger",
px will remain indeed at the px set by the developer (so pages who don't
use px start out large enough, but pages with px you need to Ctrl++).
Also I can't remember if he mentioned it there but if you use em with
media queries, those are based on your application font settings (whatever
gives most users that 16px base) and not on the body em size you may have
set.
>
> As a user, an RWD site + zoom should be more reliable as it is less
> dependant on the quirks of a particular developer using consistent units.
> As zoom works by increasing the size of CSS pixels, and all the sizing
> units are calculated to CSS pixels anyway, they all expand together.

Yeah it seems to be going that way. The issues today seem to hit more
sites who don't have a mobile, 1col setup the browser can default to
to prevent the horizontal scroll (though using ZommText brings that
back).

cheers,
_mallory