Do we still need bulletproof layouts?
1st Dec 2007
Am I alone in thinking that the new pagezoom feature that will accompany Firefox 3 is an unwelcome addition? Having used this zoom-everything feature in Internet Explorer 7 and Opera for a while now and I can safely say I hate the results. The problem is that, as you zoom in, the page quickly expands to unreadable proportions, you get a horizontal scrollbar, pixelated images and more often than not a page that is near impossible to navigate round, especially with just a keyboard. And what does this mean when it comes to producing bulletproof layouts?
Pagezoom makes bulletproof layouts a waste of time?
Ok, I'm maybe putting my neck on the line here, but I can't see the point of spending time and effort producing bulletproof layouts when the pagezoom feature will pretty much trample all over my hard work anyway? I realise that in today's media-heavy, content-rich, web world pagezoom solves a lot of problems, I'm just wondering where that will leave all the professional web designers who lovingly craft their bulletproof layouts? And even if there's the option to switch off the pagezoom capability I imagine it will come turned on by default to start with. Dark days ahead.
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This was posted on 1st Dec 2007.
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patrick h. lauke said...
two issues:
* the current way of producing bulletproof layouts/elements is, for the most part, a kludge. once we finally get support for multiple backgrounds etc in CSS 3, it'll be finally possible to bulletproof stuff without even having to rack your brain anymore ("what's the most semantic element i can wrap around this element so that i can get away with another background image?").
* pagezoom or not, you'll still need to bulletproof things to make sure that they can take a variable amount of content (if you're making a CMS template, for instance, and you need to ensure that the illusion of a rounded box or somethinng doesn't fall apart as soon as there's more than a paragraph of text in the box).
personally, i'm not a fan of dumb zooming (compared to Opera, which at least tries to rejig things once they start getting too wide for the current viewport, a la small-screen rendering), and i plan to update my text resize toolbar extension for FF3 to still offer pure text resizing (once i've delved deeper into the codebase for FF3 to see if it's actually still feasible).
Saturday 1st December 2007 1.18pm
Chris Johanesen said...
What I think page zoom will be useful for—in a way that current text resizing isn't—is for people with vision problems.
To me, bumping up the text size a bit is needed when the designer used text sizes to small. A properly designed site shouldn't need that for most "normal-visioned" people.
But for people with vision problems, they can go out an get a high-res screen (like a cheep 20" dell monitor) and then use page zoom to essentially reproduce the same ~1024px wide browsing experience most people have (text and images in the same proportions and relationships as the designer intended) while having everything on the screen be much bigger so they can actually see and read it.
Saturday 1st December 2007 5.07pm
patrick h. lauke said...
@chris
"To me, bumping up the text size a bit is needed when the designer used text sizes to small. A properly designed site shouldn't need that for most "normal-visioned" people."
ok, on properly designed sites it shouldn't be necessary, but you currently still do it on some sites, don't you? FF3 replaces text resizing with zoom, so even you and me as people with good vision can only zoom, not simply get the text up a notch or two.
"people with vision problems, they can go out an get a high-res screen (like a cheep 20" dell monitor) and then use page zoom to essentially reproduce the same ~1024px wide browsing experience most people have (text and images in the same proportions and relationships as the designer intended) while having everything on the screen be much bigger so they can actually see and read it."
that's not how people with low vision use this. for starters, yes...they may get a large monitor, but they'll also have their operating system set to large font sizes / lower resolution, or use a screen magnifier altogether - otherwise, they wouldn't be able to see the browser menus etc. so no, even for them, it won't be that much more helpful...
@blair
incidentally, after reading your post, i spent the day delving into FF3...sadly, it looks like the functionality to size text has been completely replaced by the zoom functionality. so my text size extension will just be a zoom extension (to get the +/-/= buttons in the actual toolbar, rather than just the menu). i'm waiting for it to be approved over on the mozilla addons site, but in the meantime you can grab it here: http://www.splintered.co.uk/extensions/zoombar_0.7.xpi
Saturday 1st December 2007 8.43pm
Blair Millen said...
Hey, thanks for the effort Patrick. It would be nice to have the option to choose between text-zoom and whole-page-zoom, so I'm disappointed to hear we won't. Maybe I'll hold off from upgrading to v3.
Saturday 1st December 2007 9.12pm
John Faulds said...
sadly, it looks like the functionality to size text has been completely replaced by the zoom functionality.
That seriously sucks. :/ I hate page zoom, even on Opera.
Wednesday 12th December 2007 3.29am
Fred Boulton said...
After many years of Web development and now having CSS tunnel vision I purchased Dan's (Cederholm) book and absorbed every word that he wrote, and commenced making my sites "bulletproof".
Opera 9 didn't need to be, 'cos of the zoom tool, IE7 was released and has a great zoom tool and now FF has a zoom tool, why do we need bulletproof Web sites?
Well, one good reason is the 43% of people still using IE6 and probably other older browsers. Possibly the other reason is for the various hand held devices that are being increasingly used to access the Web.
For me, the most important reason is pride in what I do. I believe that adopting CSS standards is my responsibility as a Web developer in the 21st century.
Having said that, I am continually dismayed by what I see when I look at the source code of so many Web sites still using tables for layout and etc. with huge JS code, huge Flash files with no means of bypass, JS rollovers and many other non-accessible features.
My 2 cents
Wednesday 12th December 2007 7.08am
Georg said...
Well, I still resize text - not page - in IE7, Opera 9.5b and Firefox 3b, and I can't really see the problem with page-zoom as it is implemented if Fx3. IE7 is a different story.
Web pages must still be built with resizing in mind, since all major browsers have a way to resize text and thereby alter layout-proportions. It's known as 'minimum font size' or 'ignore font size'.
Wednesday 12th December 2007 7.54am
Chris Szabo said...
Unfortunately, the page zoom issue actually becomes a problem with some not so savvy internet users. I have 1 clients that has complained to me demanding to know why the images increase in size when they increase the size of the text. Sadly, she did not want a text resizer on the layout.
Page zoom is not a web designers friend!
Wednesday 12th December 2007 8.03am
Blair Millen said...
@Fred - yep, IE6 users still need catered for
@Georg - are you saying that you can increase text-size without increasing images (and other media) in Firefox 3? Did you have to make a change to the settings beforehand? Can you do it with Ctrl+ and Ctrl -?
Wednesday 12th December 2007 8.25am
Georg said...
@Blair - It's an old option found in Opera, Firefox (3b also) and Safari.
In Fx, look under Tools --> Content --> Fonts & Colors --> Advanced --> "Minimum font size". My setting is always at '14px' (on 96dpi).
Sure, it's "deep and well hidden", but we only have to set it once. See for more on the subject.
Wednesday 12th December 2007 8.44am
Aaron said...
I'm going to possible risk a possibly hostile crowd here and admit that as a user I've always loved the page zoom in Opera. Why? Well most days I use the web on a wide range of screen sizes: my phone, my umpc, my wii (TV), my laptop, my big widescreen LCD. Page zoom tools makes this practical for me.
Maybe you people always turn out robust designs that work as well on a 240-pixel-wide screen as on a 1920-pixel-wide screen. In my experience though, not many sites achieve this. It's not much comfort that I can make the text bigger or smaller if the feature photo on the page is filling my entire screen :-)
On the other hand, on the Wii I'm using Opera on a regular size TV from across the room. Like a low-end PC the screen is about 720-pixels wide. But here I'm looking at it from six feet away. I need zoom the images as well as the text just to see if it is a boy or a girl in that photo or youtube video on your page :-)
Aaron.
Wednesday 12th December 2007 11.53am
Rob Crowther said...
@Georg - but doesn't that make all text bigger on all websites? If I just want to step up the font size of a particular website it doesn't help?
For those that are interested, I think these are the relevant bugs, the behaviour in FF3.0b1 seems to be finalised:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4821
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=389628
However, from what I understand after skim-reading through the comments, the underlying code hooks for 'text resize' as opposed to 'zoom resize' seem to be still there, so it ought to be possible to write an extension for it. The other alternative seems to be to switch to Seamonkey, where they seem to be providing a preference for whether to do resize or zoom:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=405133
Wednesday 12th December 2007 1.26pm
Montoya said...
You are definitely correct, all this time I thought I was doing users a huge favor by making my layouts fluid, and then page zoom came out for Opera and then IE 7 and a fixed layout was just as flexible, in a way, as my fluid layout which took 3 times as long to make.
I run the only gallery on the web for fluid / elastic web design and I don't see much of it anymore. Eventually CSS 3 will offer us all of these great constructs for making perfect bulletproof layouts without any kludgy stuff but by then no one will care. =/
Wednesday 12th December 2007 2.48pm
James Miller said...
I think Fred Boulton hit it on the head. It's knowing that I should do the right thing.
But, to appeal to pragmatists — this is the web. Who knows what your site will be viewed on in the next couple of years? It's more about future-compatibility than backwards, but adhering to web standards and adopting a progressive enhancement approach to design/development will help better ensure both.
Wednesday 12th December 2007 4.44pm
Georg said...
@Rob - the "minimum font size" setting will only affect pages that have declared font-sizes that are smaller than this user-preference, and won't touch pages with equal or larger font-sizes. That's the whole idea with "minimum font size"; to make too small text large enough to read.
Of course, in both Opera and Firefox it'll blow pages which rely on 'font-size: 62.5%' as base right out of the water in many cases. Such a small font-size base definitely isn't bullet-proof.
I have designed flexible pages with page-zoom and "minimum font size" in mind. for a long time. This combination has after all been around for years in Opera. Taking height for a large amount of text-resizing has of course also been part of my design-considerations. My designs now behave as intended in Firefox 3, as they do in Firefox 2, Safari and IE6. They just make different use of screen-space, which of course is fine with me.
IE7 has a different page-zoom model that makes all layouts fixed. I see no point in designing for that seemingly broken model, so I'll wait till they stabilize the zoom model in a later IE-version. Text-resizing hasn't changed in IE/win, so there's nothing to correct design-methods for there.
Wednesday 12th December 2007 4.55pm
iNSiPiD said...
The theory is that all these tools help the end user. In fact, if it wasn't for the multitude of poorly-designed, media-heavy, proprietary-content-laden sites out there, they may never have been introduced at all.
There still is, and always will be, a place for web developers with a social conscious in this world. And I, for one, will continue my superhuman struggle to be bulletproof while battling it out with YUI, blueprint (thanks Christian!) and other grid riders well into the future of FF3 - and indeed CSS3 and beyond.
Let's not turn molehills into mountains through the use of poor magnification techniques.
Thursday 13th December 2007 1.41am
Mike said...
For God's sake, Why?
Text zoom is SO much better than page zoom - how do we get this stopped?
Friday 14th December 2007 3.36pm