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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

In case anyone is curious, the design aspect of the site that pissed me off is that it blocks resizing the text. I found it too small to comfortably read, and hitting my browser's "make bigger" button just makes all the other elements on the page bigger, not the text.

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it blocks resizing the text

Bad, very bad. Don't do this, ever. You don't know what my monitor's resolution is. You don't know if I have left my glasses in the car and need to make the text huge to read what you have to say. You don't know if I have my glasses but I'm reading your words on my television across the room. You don't know if I'm using a tablet or phone and I need to pinch and zoom to navigate.

Set a default design and let me decide what to do with the page and its elements. Thank you.

Use a browser that lets you resize text? Before you say anything, I already know. I just think this is a problem with the browser, not with a site. The browser should be able to resize the text. If it can't, it's a browser failure.

Shoot. I downvoted you jason, sorry. I looked at the site's CSS and I think the problem we're experiencing is due to this site using -webkit-text-size-adjust: none;

The text does not grow in size at all in Chrome for me (while the other page elements do... the text gets squished which gives it some illusion of growing).

I tested it in Firefox 4 and increasing the font size works fine... So, I know you've been downvoted to oblivion but it is at least partially the browser's fault in this case (vendor-specific css extensions).

This is because the link is to the mobile version of the site. It's supposed to be read on a handheld.

At the bottom there is a link to the "desktop" version of the article but if you click that you will quickly realize the reason the link goes to the mobile version: the desktop version is too noisy.

It's okay. Technically, this thread about resizing text is off topic. =)

And, as I mentioned: Yes, I know about the CSS problems that prevent text resizing. I've just always thought it should be considered a browser bug if it doesn't work. After all, if the UI gives you the option to increase the size of the text, it should increase the size of the text regardless of the CSS on the page.

I opened a bug with Chromium if you feel like starring it :)

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=84888

It will probably get marked Wontfix but hey I tried!

I've also added that the UI of Chrome makes Zoom available despite the content of the page not being able to zoom. And starred it.

Though, I'm a FF4 user. =)

Wouldn't it be possible to override this with a user agent stylesheet?

It seems the CSS is written like that because the link was to the mobile version of the site.

And if you visit it with JavaScript turned off, you get a "Fuck You" popover. If all your site is doing is giving me some text content, and your site completely breaks with JavaScript off, you're a bad programmer and a bad person.

That's similar to other problems I have with sites recently: their super-special javascript on textareas screws up my own resizing of them, and even worse, ruins ctrl/cmd Z! I don't know how they do it, but screwing up Undo is pretty serious.

This happens when you listen to and then improperly handle keyboard events.

Somebody probably just copied a script from w3schools and smashed their face into it for a few hours until it did some approximation of what they might have maybe wanted it to do.

Unfortunately, the buckshot approach to software development leaves a lot to be desired. Especially when you start with such a horrible original product as w3schools.

These are fairly professional sites, though, run by otherwise decent designers and programmers. I think it's more that they adopted an incomplete jQuery plugin, and didn't fully consider the repercussions of changing standard browser controls. That's happened a lot in the past few years... people customize select menus, checkboxes, etc. that are customized (mainly in appearance) with javascript and CSS, and then lost a lot of the native functionality. It produces problems that are reminiscent of why people turned on Flash sites... hopefully the progress of HTML 5 and CSS3 will help this situation, by providing a standard way to do things that have need custom hacks in the past.

Are there any decent alternatives to w3schools? I have to introduce somebody to very basic web-development and would hate to have to point them to a resource as bad as w3schools.

Edit: I just found this excellent SO link on the topic: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4662304/online-html-css-j...

When I was entirely starting out, I found the tutorials at tizag.com to be helpful.

The text resizes in FF4. Do you know what causes the text not to resize in your browser? It seems weird to me that you can force a browser to disallow resizing an element.

Edit: Well now I get the Apache Tomcat default page so it may be impossible to answer this question.

Looks like -webkit-text-size-adjust: none; which would explain why it works fine in FF. The text does not re-size for me in Chrome.

Safari [reader] button (or readability bookmarklet) fixes this (as well as many other reader-unfriendly pages).

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