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

On May 20, 2012, at 3:23 PM, Hugh Guiney <hugh.guiney@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

For a regular web page on an iPhone, you zoom out to see a whole page, or zoom in to see one section or article. It wouldn't work well for users if the type got 10 tens bigger if you were zoomed out to 10% zoom, or if the layout kept changing as you pinched in or out on a page.

Received on Monday, 21 May 2012 18:45:10 UTC