Gernot Hassenpflug wrote:
> Hello,
>
> This is my first post, a short intro: b. in South Africa, 37,
> background engineering, working as atmospheric science researcher in
> Tokyo, interests in LaTeX, web design, and document archiving and
> long-term compatibility. Using Debian and Ubuntu GNU/linux for work
> and at home.
>
> I've been trying to improve my own webpage design (header, 3
> columns, footer) to cater for gecko, khtml and IE6/7 rendering
> engines. Mostly done, and problems of margins/padding and use of extra
> DIVs understood. I've done some Googling and searches of some months
> of d-css archives but came up short on the following topic (not sure
> what to search for, tried "resize", "block", "font", "CSS"):
>
> What I am worried about is the following: how can one design CSS
> styles that resize the block elements when the user decided to
> increase the font (of the inline text)? At some point, all the fine
> examples I've found (e.g., http://www.ground.cz/luci/css/my3cols.html)
> break down and text extrudes from a block or starts to enter an
> adjacent block. This even occurs with the css-d website.
>
> What I'd like, I think, is an expanded viewport (virtual, i.e.,
> larger than the actual screen) with---scroll bars activated---as the
> block elements all expand to cater for the extra needed space as the
> font size is increased.
>
> So I'm curious if there is some tactic that is accepted, or whether
> CSS2/3 cannot provide any guarantees once certain constraints are not
> kept.
>
As far as I understand, this cannot be achieved (being 100% safe)
because browsers have problems dealing with this resizing, so the
proportions are lost and you get what you already saw --but it seems all
major browsers will have native zooming once Fx 3 comes out, since Opera
and now IE 7 already have it.
Now, what you're looking for is a solid layout using "relative"
units (em, ex, %, etc.) instead of "absolute" units (px, pt, etc.). Both
'em' and 'ex' are relative to the font size, so the bigger the font the
bigger (in pixels) they are. Another thing, I guess the sites you
mentioned that get broken have a "safe margin" for font resizing where
the layout stays well-formed, am I right? This is usually the case, if
not, the site could have a couple of issues.
A downside of this method is that you can't have "pixel-perfect"
layouts, and you must use images intelligently. Some people set the
images size in relative units too to get a better scaling effect, just
like zooming.
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