houbi.com / blog

IE7 finally made it easy to scale up/scale down the font size (‘ctrl’-‘+’, ‘ctrl’-‘-‘, or the ‘100%’ situated at the bottom right of the screen). Long time coming!

The IE7-team elected to go with “page zooming” instead of “font scaling” for this. This means not only the fonts go up in size, everything does. Opera 9 has this feature, and it works like a charm. A real bonus for the users: they can scale up, always, even if the designer had the anal idea of controlling his intended minuscule font-size in pixels or in images.

And then the IE7 implementation came around. It’s an unfinished work! Just look at a few of the horrible consequences it has on the layout of the website I work for (fluid layout, ems-based, so that it would scale together with the font-size the user chooses to look at the site in).

Just look at these (screenshots are from this page):

Everything scales, except for the page background (the vdab-logo is an image, blended in to the background):

The crumbtrail below is a bunch of <li>’s, text with a border-bottom, and a background image with padding/margin to have the text next to it:

And, cream of the crop, these are just a bunch of radio buttons and labels, stacked

Some blogbuzz/discussions on this:

• Firefox and Safari, implement the Zoom feature! Just make sure you do it better than IE7. Please!
• Zeldman article about the consequences of hacks on IE7-layouts.
• IE7: Were they ready? Quick check on a sample of websites to see how many break in IE7.
• IE 7 Bug #001