iOS dynamic type on the web | Hacker News Reader

iOS dynamic type on the web

mrmrs.io

26 pointsmrmrs15 comments

I recall reading someone complaining about Apple adding this feature. Unlike normal vendor prefixes, it's not really for an experimental feature that other vendors might implement, it's a final feature that is proprietary.

It'd be foolish to use it on the broader web (and I don't know any instances of anyone doing so), but it seems like it could be really useful for HTML intended to be rendered in an app on an Apple platform.

Why can't we have the same thing for "-android-system-headline" for example? And when everyone implements it, it would be just "system-headline".

A brief Googling didn't make it clear to me whether Android has the option to set global text size or, if it does, whether it matches Apple's scheme sufficiently well that it'd make sense to have a common specification for this.

That's a lot like saying that after searching the Usenet, you didn't find that IE supported the <blink> tag, while Netscape did :)

Android should let you set system font sizes. It's a usability thing. And if Apple, Google, and MS can agree on how this is done, that'd be a good thing for everyone involved.

We can! And we should!

From my understanding - it is proprietary at the moment but Apple has publicly pushed for other vendors to do something similar and for it to be standardized. There is a discussion on w3c to make this a standard: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2015Jul/0169....

I get that this is proprietary - but I do like the idea of font styles being driven by global user settings at the browser or system level. Would love to see more of this in the future.

I put this together mostly so that I could build some simple iOS prototypes with html and css - not something I'd use for the average web app project.

Good luck convincing designers to use this.

My parents can't use a few applications because of designers refusal. My dad literally had to change banks because some of the banks used too small fonts. So far none of them use dynamic type, but at least some have larger fonts.

He changed banks. That's so fucking weird. Changing a bank because of its app. Have not heard this before.

If someone running iOS could provide screenshots then this article would get a whole lot more interesting

It's helvetica font of varying weights/sizes - not at all interesting to look at.

In short - you specify 'apple device headline font' in css and the phone uses whatever the default headline font is for that version of iOS.

Very useful for making web apps look native by matching the system fonts.

Here's what the page looks like on an iPad: http://imgur.com/tUGUfpA

On an iPhone 6S: https://i.imgur.com/8fNGdl7.gif

Any screenshots for non-iOS users?

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