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montroseryesterday at 10:17 PM5 repliesview on HN

Good problem to solve, but this particular solution is a fast path to hell for everyone involved.

You just can't scale text size independently of layout and interface. The size of the text is fundamentally related to the structural layout of the page. The number of columns, the size of images, the relative placement of buttons and UI elements -- it's all inextricably tied to the size of the text.

Good news is that we already have a solution for this: responsive design, aka page zoom. Every serious site already gracefully handles a wide range of viewport widths. When you zoom in, you are simply simulating a narrower viewport width. This type of constraint and flexibility is already well tested. Zooming in makes the text bigger. And, zooming in makes the layout adapt to a single column when that's all that will fit. It all works harmoniously together, because we test and accommodate for all viewport sizes, which is the same as all zoom levels.

The proposal at hand to scale text alone is bad for everyone. Developers now have a geometric set of permutations to test. What about an ultra-wide viewport with large text? What about a small viewport with large text? What about a wide viewport with small text? It's so much that it won't make business sense to invest in all of the testing, and all of the design and implementation work to accommodate all of the cases. And so, it will be bad for end users who will set their text size to their preference, and then find that actually usability and readability are now worse.

In the end the answer is simple: when users set their text size to be larger in the OS, browser vendors should increase the default zoom in browsers. This is already how it works on Windows, and it is definitely the best path to happiness for all.


Replies

dfabulichyesterday at 10:45 PM

That's the testing matrix we have to do for iOS and Android apps today. The screen sizes don't go all the way up to ultrawide, but 13" iPad (portrait and landscape) down to 4" iPhone Mini, at every "Dynamic Type" display setting is required.

It's not that tough, but there can be tricky cases.

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fasssssttoday at 2:03 AM

> This is already how it works on Windows, and it is definitely the best path to happiness for all.

Actually Windows has a newish independent text scale accessibility setting that is different than display scale.

Yea, sometimes you have to update your UI to account for that, but it’s not a big deal most of the time.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/develop/input...

crazygringoyesterday at 11:46 PM

Seriously.

Browsers originally had text zoom -- only text zoom -- until page zoom was invented, I can't remember by which browser. And then page zoom quickly became the "main" zoom mechanism across all browsers because it was obviously so much better -- icons, layout, everything adjusted together. (And for those who remember, when there was only text zoom, it was a common practice/workaround to define everything in em rather than px, precisely to "fake" page zoom with text zoom.)

I'm baffled by the idea of trying to bring text zoom back. Just no, a million times. We tried it. It was bad.

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mjmasyesterday at 11:11 PM

This is supporting something that already exists for native phone apps. My phone has separate options for display size and text size.

And so I have it set to have smaller buttons but still a normal-size font.

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wetpawsyesterday at 10:29 PM

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