Re: [csswg-drafts] Browser zoom unit for accessibility [css-values-and-units] (#6869)

I'm super confused about most of things that have been said in this thread. Here are some questions:

1. At the beginning of this thread, @scottkellum said:

> Two possible solutions: ... 2. Setting a standard for browsers to zoom the root font size instead of the size of a pixel.

Safari has this feature. Would it be sufficient to advocate to other browsers to implement a similar feature too?

2. The problem shown in https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/6869#issuecomment-991227215 and https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/6869#issuecomment-991288325 seems to be "Sites often have a mobile layout with small text which is different from a desktop layout with big text, and use a min-width media query to switch between them, but when the user zooms in, that media query can be triggered (because the size of the pixels got bigger) thereby giving the user the small text mobile layout on their desktop machine. This leads to text getting smaller when the user zooms in, which is counter-intuitive."

However, the solution being advocated for, a "browser zoom unit", would require website adoption. But if website adoption is required anyway, why not just tell the websites "hey when people zoom your site the text gets smaller, and that's bad"?

3. Then, after talking about media queries, @cookiecrook then says:

> Effectively the use of **minus** `1rem` in a calc is the core problem.

to which @scottkellum replies:

> I set the scale function like that because I wanted a steeper slope for a more pronounced typographic hierarchy. If you use `+ 1rem` the hierarchy is no where near as pronounced.

But just because `+ 1rem` is bad doesn't mean that `- 1rem` is the only other solution. Why not use a function that has typographic hierarchy _and_ is an increasing function? What about `+ 1rem - 16px`?

4. Lastly, I don't understand these graphs at all. The X axis is viewport size and the Y axis is font size, and the problem we're dealing with is a situation where, as viewport size increases, font size can decrease. Except there is no part of any of the graphs above where any of the functions decrease.

The blue line is "Typetura / interpolated values" which is a continuous function. Are you presenting this to indicate that the blue line is the desired line? Can we solve this issue by just adding a `smoothstep()` function to `calc()`?

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Received on Wednesday, 5 January 2022 20:47:45 UTC