Zoom to fit web page:
I love fluid, edge to edge websites. They fill my window with no waste. Much as I hate fixed, non-fluid websites, web “designers” insist on locking font size to width like their site was a graphic or a PDF - totally missing the point of why HTML is so good. Anyhow, we need Safari to be able to zoom into these websites. And, to make it easier for us, there needs to be an automatic “zoom to fit” function - so that the fonts and graphics scale as you resize the window. I can’t believe I just requested this but it would be nice! By the way, this functionality is in Safari on the iPhone so this shouldn’t be difficult.

Cheers Daniel

Thanks, but that’s actually a feature of Mac OS X, not Safari. I want zooming within the web browser itself, which is coming to most web browsers now, including future versions of Safari.

Just wanted to point out that it is on Safari. Ctrl and then scroll.

Einar

Interesting! I appreciate the tip, it sounds like something I could potentially stumble on as well.

I was pulling my hair out wondering why the page was rendering incorrectly when viewed on the live domain, but fine previewed locally in Dreamweaver. I was thinking it was some problem with my machine (rebooted), or the CSS has changed somehow (re-uploaded all files), or a page change being cached (cleared out cache/refreshed page loads/restart Firefox), or the setup of our web server (checking MIME types and page serve settings)! Grrrrrr!!!

Eventually I realised it was simply due to the Zoom feature. I must have hit CTRL+”-” at some point which reduced the display to 80%, which was not that noticeable until I used 2 tabs to view the local/remote pages side-by-side.

The new site design I’m working on “zooms” quite nicely except for a non-scaling Flash navigation menu product we use, which remains fixed size, and therefore extends beyond the screen edge when the page is zoomed smaller.

I have since disabled the “remember” zoom setting for domains in Firefox (type about:config in FF address bar, then double-click the browser.zoom.siteSpecific preference), so that it always resets to default next time viewing the web site.

Zoom is great, but this really had me stumped for a long while.

Cool, I can’t wait!

system preference / Universal acces / Zoom on

that is!

Well, first, freedom of choice. Zooming shouldn’t exclude the font resizing feature.

And to suggest a JavaScript solution isn’t a good road to go. People can have JavaScript because of choice, over-zealous anti-virus programs, company proxy servers that filter script out etc.

But absolutely, well done web pages seldom call out for a page zoom. But still, I’d like to offer the opportunity to those who want it.

For me, I hate it to have a full page zoom. I zoom only for an easier reading of the text, and bigger images means lees space for the text.
Yes, on bad designed pages you get a problem with only text zooming, but you should blame the webdesigner for that.

And to say like Hugo that webdesigner allready had enough to do without that: Hey, that’s there job!
Also it’s free for every webdesigner to solve that problem via javascript manually, there are allready sites that do this.

But for me it means lost of space used for text. And if you made a page where Images a too important part and resized brokes dramaticly without that, the website then bad designed.

This side here is an good example for a right design: Enough space for text, not to much useless design images, can be zoomed good in firefox. I have definitly no need for a page zoom here.

I would definitly stop using firefox if the page zoom would be default (or really scream until I have a plugin which deactivates that).

Only my opinion to that.

Yes, I worry about that too…

There’s really no excuse for Firefox not having it implemented by now. The lack of page zooming is listed on their Bugzilla, but it’s been there since 1999 and it’s *still* unassigned. They’re saying wait for version 3.0. But if no one’s working on it now, what chance do they have of even meeting that deadline…

Thanks for a long comment!
You make some good points, but I’d say that the gist of it is that, as you say, whether you like it or not, it’s here to stay, so just get going and implement it. Now!

A common dismissal of page zooming is: “the designers should’ve used ‘em’s, not fixed units”. Nope, for 2 reasons:

1. Designing with pixel/pt units is not only perfectly valid use of CSS but is the method employed by a certain majority of websites. If designing this way is “bad practice”, many of the best designers on the web are doing it “wrong” — even if their code validates and there’s not one table used for anything other than tabular data. Designers are already under enough peer pressure to produce sites that use nothing but CSS for layout, are XHTML 1.1 Strict compliant, are accessible to the disabled and still look attractive on browsers several versions out of date. The last thing they need is to be told they’re all doing it wrong because someone decided “Page Zoom is bad, mmkay”.

2. More to the point, it’s practically pointless sizing divs/text on your page in ‘em’s if nothing else on the page will resize with them. Most sites use images as a part of their layout and to spruce up the body text. If your company logo is an image, your navigation links are images, your ‘faux columns’ background uses an image, your fancy-styled titles are images, your <li> bullet points are images, etc., you will have a site that when scaled not only becomes more and more visually repulsive but becomes increasingly difficult to read rather than decreasingly so. Sure, your body text is more legible, but not only is it all squeezed inside a fixed-width faux column background image but all the title images are smaller than the text below them and the navigation images are microscopic!

Another argument is that images will become “pixellated” if zoomed. Look at images enlarged by Opera’s Page Zoom, by IE’s Page Zoom or even by the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. Are they sharply pixellated? No. The software is able to smoothen it out. Besides — if ones vision is so impaired as to require zooming in that far, I doubt pixellation is the first concern on ones mind!

Maybe if we were still in the mid-90’s, when the only images on webpages were occasional photographs dropped into blocks of lightly styled, completely fluid text, there would be little use for zooming. But that’s not what modern sites are like. Images and fixed unit designing are inseparable aspects of modern site layouts; the only way to scale those modern sites is to zoom the entire page.

Glad that’s out of the system. Hadn’t eaten for days until now. Where’s that number for Dominos…

Yes.
Macs support any USB mouse that you can use on a PC.

I agree that there are times when you want to slightly resize the text only, so zoom and changing text size shouldn’t be exclusive features. In the end, it’s all about giving people options.