Comments on: Developing an effective text-resizing widget

By: Joe Dolson

Joe Dolson — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:55:44 +0000

Thanks, Shawn! Selectively resizing content is definitely a boon. Although it can be done with custom style sheets in most modern browsers, that’s generally beyond the skill level — - and well beyond the “reasonable expectations” level — - for most web users.

Yes, the distortion of pages with text resizing is an issue — - although, to be frank, it’s an issue with both systems. I’ve seen no shortage of text resizing widgets which failed to accommodate for that kind of thing, as well!

By: Shawn

Shawn — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 16:19:26 +0000

Couple things to add:

1. With resizing controls you have ability to selectively resize page content. You can let user resize article content but not the navigations, menus etc. So it is more flexible;

2. Not all browsers are born equal as others already mentioned. FF 2 does not offer page wide zooming, a page can be greatly distorted; One should consider offering or coding the page to reduce distortion upon text resizing. IE 7 does a much better job here.

Tip to accommodate browser’s resizing: explicitly specify image width in em.

This will force FF to resize images along with text to minimize distortion.

By: Joe Dolson

Joe Dolson — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 01:47:53 +0000

Thanks, Dennis — - browsers aren’t really doing us a favor by emphasizing these “Zoom” tools so much. If they were less buggy, it would be better, but until then…

By: Dennis

Dennis — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 23:09:32 +0000

Great article Joe. There’s definitely a lack of consistency in text resizing tools/widgets, and I agree it should be up to the browser to handle that functionality. Adding to the mix is that in IE7, there’s a Zoom menu in the bottom right, but no easy text-resizing tool.

By: Joe Dolson

Joe Dolson — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:16:28 +0000

That is incredibly irritating…the kind of so-called accessibility innovation which makes me scream. I can just imagine the developer putting in hours of labor just to create more frustration. (Well intentioned, of course.)

Thanks, Stevie

By: Stevie D

Stevie D — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 13:41:30 +0000

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve come across a site with the text illegibly-small, and used the on-screen text resizer, to bump it up to far-too-small-to-read-comfortably, but it wouldn’t go any further than that.

A widget that only allows “a little bit smaller than default” and “a little bit larger than default” is worse than useless. Ideally it should infinitely resize text, but realistically it needs to have small, normal, large, x-large and xx-large as a minimum.

By: Joe Dolson

Joe Dolson — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 16:10:03 +0000

Huh. That’s interesting - I like the fact that Firefox 3 will remember the setting, but I’m less thrilled by the “zoom” feature. Although, with the option to preserve the site width, that’s not so bad. The question, of course, will be how easy it is to configure those settings…

Yeah, I saw what Dan had written…I can’t say I’m sure what he means by that…

Understand that when building an already-wide layout, it’ll get really wide, really fast. That’s OK. Wide is the new drop shadow. Dan Cederholm

Personally, while a little wide is fine, you’ve got to draw limits somewhere. Horizontal scrolling continues to suck!

By: David Owens

David Owens — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 12:59:33 +0000

Firefox 3 will remember the zoom level on specific websites.

Interestingly, this will be a zoom though, as used by Internet Explorer 7. I’m not 100% sold on this at the moment, and it could be another reason to use a widget on your site. It would enable you to set it up so that the text size increases but the width of the site stays the same.

Having said that, Dan Cederholm has proclaimed that “Wide is the new drop shadow”.