Anonymously Famous wrote:Once I came here and saw that there was something to see other than just a corner, I messed around on my browser a little and found that I was able to see the image by zooming in.
I've been quite impressed by how many web sites have learned how to defeat the browsers' zooming feature, typically by changing the sizes of parts of the pages in random-looking directions, and even changing the size-change patterns for each zoom. I recall my reaction the first time I saw this: Wow! That's incredibly perverse user hostility. I wonder how they do it.
I still haven't figured out most of their zoom-defeating tricks, but by experimenting a bit, I've found how some of them work. I also learned that it's not just the web-site developer's doing; most browsers have lately adopted some sizing tricks that seem aimed at interfering with legibility. The simplest is probably Safari's approach of sizing a page for a window much larger than the screen you're holding in your hand, and if you pinch it to make it smaller, it makes the font size smaller, too, so the text becomes unreadable.
But there are a lot of other size-related tricks now that make difficult or impossible to create a page that "works" everywhere. The main one seems to be the growing abandonment of the main reason that HTML was invented: To "reflow" text so it fits inside whatever rectangle the browser has available at the moment. The other, of course, is the growing use of whitespace to minimize what's visible in that rectangle. Thus, the Preview panel for this comment has a whitespace area on the right that's about 1/3 the window's width; changing the window size causes the text to reflow, but that 1/3 of wasted space remains at all window sizes.
(I have some vision-limited friends who are convinced that these changes are aimed at them, to force them to pay for new gadgets that restore their ability to read things online. I've wasted a lot of time trying to defeat this user hostility, and make my pages maximally readable, but it's slowly getting more difficult as the browser makers learn more readability-defeating tricks.)
