This link has been bookmarked by 8 people . It was first bookmarked on 08 Oct 2008, by Matt Lisle.
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01 Dec 08
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17 Nov 08
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22 Oct 08
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09 Oct 08
Paolo SordiBrowsers now default to full page zoom.
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08 Oct 08
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The implications on a designer are fairly dramatic; page zoom is an attempt to continue accurately rendering the page as it was designed, whereas text scaling simply reflows the text, often causing serious layout problems. With full page zoom, the responsibility for ensuring page integrity and legibility is moved out of the designer’s hands, and placed fully on the browser. With text resizing, the designer needs to be conscientious of the ways their layout will break at different text sizes, and compensate accordingly.
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I wonder if the low-vision users who have increased this default font size will see a page that is “broken” from the very start
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maybe it’s time to just start designing in pixels and stop worrying about ems.
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Personally, I hate page zoom. I often resize text on web pages because my fellow web designers often seem to think that 10 px Arial looks pretty. In fact, I have my multi-button mouse setup with text resize shortcuts… and they get used daily. I’m not old, I just don’t like reading tiny 10 or 11 px text on my 24” monitor. In 13 years of web development, I’ve never built a site that couldn’t resize. However, many websites fail to take resize into account. So as a result of poor coding and amateur developers, we now seem to be stuck with zooming. Ugh.
So… should we still code for resizing? Yes. Of course. Because it’s the right thing to do and it doesn’t take any more effort (if you know what you’re doing).
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consider why we use ems, it is because this is the best unit treated relatively by all browsers. The specs, however, define the pixel as relative to the screen resolution. So switching to pixel-based dimensioning
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If you design your page with percentages, the page zoom function of modern browsers (IE 7 is an exception here) will scale the text, but not the column width.
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“Today, I think those accessibility issues are mostly gone. IE6 usage is on the decline, and I think it’s fair to suggest that most low-vision users who need to resize text probably realized long ago that IE6 didn’t allow them to do so on all websites.”
But unfortunately text sizing continues to fail in both IE7 and even the IE8 beta. Remarkably, this is a glitch that Microsoft kept sticking to for some reason, even when the majority feel as though it’s a bug.
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one of the reasons I like sizing with ems, is that it forces you to be flexible – not only for resizing _text_, but for allowing varying amounts of content as well. Blowing up the text was always an easy way to test for the integrity of various design components, answering the question: what will happen if there’s more “stuff” here? Relative units allow for future expansion, last-minute edits, or ham-fisted modifications.
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Any time browser technology takes the brunt of solving accessibility issues before they become the designer’s responsibility is a good thing.
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