Re: [css3-mediaqueries] Re: Media queries using relative units

On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 12:30 PM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu> wrote:
>>
>> The width as measured in CSS pixels is the same. Having a retina display
>> doesn't change the width, so why should zoom?
>
>
> It really depends on the zoom implementation.  Some zoom implementations
> work by just changing the size of a CSS px, since that automatically resizes
> everything that's not using percentage sizes..

Could you explain the decision to have the default zoom mode trigger
MQs in Firefox? Because I think it is the right one; as a developer
that is exactly what I want to happen as it makes the site much more
accessible than it would otherwise be.

To illustrate: I have a friend with a low-vision impairment. His
browser zoom (in Chrome) is set very high, which means on many pages
he visits every day, the layout is deteriorated—not only do elements
often get pushed out of place or wrap uncomfortably, but he has to do
a lot of scrolling back and forth as the page width increases beyond
the viewport width. This should sound familiar even to those of us
without visual impairments, as it is essentially the same problem
anyone would have accessing a desktop-optimized site on a mobile
device.

Em-based MQs triggered by page zooms completely solve this problem,
since if the site is responsive, then at a certain zoom level the
quote-unquote "mobile" layout will kick in and the whole page will
automatically be optimized for a smaller viewport. Note that Opera has
the same behavior here as Firefox, so if WebKit followed suit it would
unify browser behavior and un-break a lot of the Web as the responsive
movement gains more and more traction.

Received on Sunday, 20 May 2012 22:24:05 UTC