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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

> And disabling zooming? WHO EVEN DECIDED THAT WEBSITES SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO DO THIS?!

Applications such as maps, image editors, presentations, and flowcharts benefit from having control over zoom. (And you'll notice that almost every one of them does.)

This of course is only one difference of many between "documents" and "applications" and the web is being used for both.

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No, they benefit from overriding the pinch gesture or the scroll wheel. Browser zoom shouldn't need to be a casualty for those features to work, it ought to stay available in some form.

Yes, that's what people mean.

Browser zoom cannot be overridden.

Yes it can be, with the viewport meta tag. I've also seen some web apps, mostly maps, whose CSS or JS tries to resist browser zoom in ways that break the layout or make them unusable.

Plus, overriding the zoom gestures makes it really hard in mobile browsers to access the actual browser zoom, although I blame that on browsers.

yes you're right. we have a map with a toolbar at the top of the screen. when zoom was enabled people were constantly zooming in preventing them from being able to see some or all of the buttons hindering their ability to use the app. and causing confusion because they didn't realize they were zoomed in. as soon as we disabled zoom the complaints and questions stopped.

setting just the toolbar to not zoomable should have been the obvious solution.

(In stead I have to disable zooming in on images to preserve the next/previous/close buttons and implement zoom from scratch. wtf?)

Maps drive me fucking nuts, taking over zoom. As do nearly every other app that does it. They think they know what's good for me, and they don't, and it leads to me using them less. Yes, paper maps just work better for me a lot of the time.

The only thing maps.app or Google maps are good for are finding places to spend money or driving to places to spend money. If you have any other spatial interests, they're almost pointless.

I would happily run a build that removes this capability.

I would love to see your maps app that doesn't touch zoom.

No offense, I had to try that..

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/LARGE_el...

Look how fast and responsive it is!

With progressive decoding and spatial range requests this could actually be a reasonable replacement for a slippy map.

I'll use it on my drive home.

That supports touch zoom just fine, it just has a low limit to how far in it goes.

Obtaining the zoom level is an adventure worse than implementing multi-touch-twist-and-shout-zoom from scratch.

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