Thank you, it makes me very happy to hear that!
Also, I’m very glad that you share my opinion.

great article - I completely agree. I hadn’t been aware of the zoom feature in Opera until I recently saw a link to this article, tried it, loved it, love the fact that it’s in IE7, and think that it should definitely become a standard feature.

Let the designers and developers get back to do doing their thing, and lets the browsers worry about handling it properly.

Great! Glad it helps!

Thanks!

Jonny,

Good to see you here!
Absolutely, I agree, there’s room for both. Therefore, I really wish every web browser manufacturer should implement the zoom feature; I’m sure the end users would like it.

And also, as you say, I don’t think designers should do math to get it to work.

Steve,

Interesting to hear about sIFR!

Chris,

That’s an interesting distinction; fonts set in pixels shouldn’t scale no matter the web browser, while set in other units should. Maybe it should be like that when it comes to adapting to the text size setting, but I also opt for the zooming feature.

When it comes to the text size setting in IE for users that don’t know about it, I wrote a script to check for it and to offer a fallback alternative.

Tommy,

Yes and no, it was just an example. But still, design is made in pixels to begin with. I still think most web site owners as well as end users would prefer if everything scaled accordingly, to get a more consistent visual experience.

Jules,

That’s one way, although I always use Ctrl and +/- to change the text size in Mozilla, Command and +/- in Safari and +/- in Opera. I’m a keyboard shortcuts freak!

Opera has been my favourite browser for many years and will likely stay on top for many more.

a super-huge font in 150 pixels wide columns

You shouldn’t set a column width in pixels unless it only contains images with a known pixel width. Pixel-sized text columns are evil, for the very reason you just outlined.

The whole subjects has many ifs and buts and no easy answers.

An interesting (or not?) fact I learned whilst fixing my blog to work in Opera is that its zoom feature cannot scale SiFR text, though regular flash appears to scale ok?

And I agree, Opera’s implementation of page zoom is by far the best

So for large zoom or tiny screens (phones typically have 100-240 pixel width) we opt for reformatting the page to fit the screen instead of scaling it to unreadability.

Pixels got a bad reputation for accessibility because if you coded with pixels you were stuck with them in IE. I’m not sure if that will be fixed in IE7. Pixels make sense when you want something on the same scale as an image (that except for SVG always are of pixel height and width).

But ems are useful too. If you have h1 {font-size: 1.6em} instead of 24px if the default body type is 15px, the ‘h1′ would automatically scale to the right size if you later change it to 20px (it would then be 32px) or to 10px (16px).

We, the browser makers, shouldn’t have problems with fractional pixels and all the math stuff is something we should do and the web designers shouldn’t have to worry about it. But there are some fairly tricky edge cases, and it is possible to be off by a pixel. For fonts it is a bit more complicated that that because not all fonts scale well. If a font only looks good at the fixed sizes of 13.33px and 16px, it won’t look good either in 14px or in 14.5px.

The exact same things applies to zooming. You can set a default magnification that will be applied to all pages, eliminating the need to set it all the time.

This isn’t about fear of losing control or not allowing the end users freedom; on the contrary. I think most users would prefer scaling the interface and elements accordingly, as opposed to having a super-huge font in 150 pixels wide columns.

I agree that using % values are a well recommended approach, but also that end users should have the possibility to scale it as well. I’m not saying the web page should be zoomed when, for instance, the window is resized. What I’m saying is that zooming should be a given feature that is optional for end users who like what they see but want to make it bigger or smaller.

Someone who needs larger text can set a larger default, and your em-based layout will respect that, whereas a pixel-based will not. So what if you can zoom it? Why should you have to zoom everything every time? Surely it should be enough to do it once, by specifying a larger base font size?

This sounds like the usual whingeing from old-school print designers who lament the lack of ‘control’ on the Web. The users are in control; that’s what makes Web publishing different (and in some respects more difficult) than print design. If you can’t cope with that, there’s always PDF…