[ cc:ing list again, with Ezequiel Garzón's permission ] On Friday 2014-03-14 10:36 +0100, Ezequiel Garzón wrote: > >> Is this font boosting/inflation? > > > > It sounds like it is. > > > > Thanks for the feedback, David. I don't mean to extend this thread ad > infinitum, but it's basically the core of my question to this list. > Doesn't a feature named "font inflation", which basically decides > what's the best size for a given chunk of text, break CSS badly? If > this is the industry trend I wouldn't be surprised to see major > browsers apply font boosting even with the meta tag, etc. What's next? > "Font wisdom", where the browser chooses font family, color, weight, > etc., ignoring all the styling? I wish browsers spent more time on > making CSS-free content look better, improving their defaults (tables > come quickly to mind), instead of ignoring CSS declarations.
The alternative to font inflation is substantially worse. Mobile browsers give you a viewport in which you can pan and zoom around a desktop-size viewport of the page. This feature exists for compatibility, to allow mobile Web browsers to view Web pages designed before good mobile Web browsers existed, or designed without considering them. If you've considered mobile in your design, you can use a <meta viewport> in your page to opt out of parts or all of this behavior. Some Web pages contain text that the user wants to read, and to do this, and in cases where these dual viewports exist, the user needs to zoom in to make the text a decent size. If, at that zoom level where the font is readably large, the user needs to scroll side to side to reach *each line* of the text, because the width of the block is wider than the device. This is a horrible experience. Font inflation exists to solve only this problem, which is a problem that fundamentally would make mobile Web browsers unusable. It doesn't happen if pages declare a <meta viewport> that means there's no viewport scaling involved, and it doesn't happen if all their blocks are narrow enough to be readable without side-to-side scrolling for each line. -David -- 𝄞 L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ 𝄂 𝄢 Mozilla https://www.mozilla.org/ 𝄂 Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)
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