Rethinking Text Resizing on Web

That's just bs. As a maker of UI, I want to get a rectangle, put my controls on it with the sizes in cm/in/° as I see fit and then to just slide right-bottom to see what happens on different screen sizes. One doesn't have to buy a foot-high stack of smartphones and tablets to test an effing label.

The whole issue stems from the fact we can't measure things correctly, cause the whole measurement system bases on ideas from winword era.

These re resolutions are usually significantly higher then the iPhone mini. usually The product owner or UX/design make that decision because you need to make a cut somewhere, and almost nobody uses small phones anymore. So they're making the judgement call that these people aren't worth the money creating the design, testing that every flow works correctly etc.

It's definitely annoying to be outside of the target demographic however, I know the feeling well.

They also don't understand that people will visit your web site with their phone, even tho we have a native app.

I don't think I've ever seen a website respect my phone's text size, and frankly I didn't know it was posisble, this Airbnb blog post is cool and makes me want to update my own sites.

Desktop web versus phone/tablet/tocuhscreen? I’d take the innovations and how forward they’ve moved us and society over anything in the past… they’re not just about input but forced new solutions and took us to new places.

Can anything be implemented better? Of course, and I agree with you: the next disruption will be better.

BUT will also expose more challenges in how we deal with tech, each other, and the planet.

I think the format is perfect for consumption. That this became so separated from creation is another problem.

Touchscreens are not necessarily the best input device for any one task, but they are the second best input device for pretty much all tasks. They are very versatile - you don't need to define all your inputs up front, instead you can add new controls dynamically as needed (such as a keyboard that only shows up when you're inputting text, and even adapts to the type of text you're working with). When working with a desktop, you have a range of specialist input devices, from mice, keyboards (which themselves are a combination of different input devices for different tasks), drawing pads, trackballs, etc. A touchscreen will never be as good as any of these devices, but it can do the job of all of them, and switch between them as necessary.

Obviously there are limits to how useful this versatility is. A touchscreen in a car, for example, can control a lot of different aspects of that car from one place, but it makes finding those controls more complicated. So controls that need to be accessed regularly or quickly still need their own separate physical buttons. It's why volume buttons tend to still be physical on most phones. But you'd equally not want to control your car with a keyboard and a bunch of different shortcuts - understanding the tool that's best for the job is key.

And the point here is that the touchscreen is the best tool if you want something versatile.

I also think there's a big advantage to the vertical form factor for many applications - just look at how we've settled on a vertical format for almost all reading material. Again, it has its disadvantages as well, but most phones can switch between vertical and horizontal modes as necessary. Vertical screens also tend to have the largest accessible space if used in one hand - look at how far your thumb can move side-to-side vs top-to-bottom when operating a phone in one hand.

Smartphones are the form and size that they are because it works well: it is largely accessible, it's convenient, and people find it convenient to use. And it's not like it's just the first thing that we tried that stuck - there are a myriad of failed smartphone concepts that have been tried out but just aren't as convenient.

That's not to say that you have to find the smartphone concept convenient yourself, but it's valuable understanding why they work so well for so many people.

And regarding touch input: there's no physical feedback. Touchscreens are inferior to buttons you can feel the edges of, or keys you can push and hear as they click. Most of the older people in my life still struggle with touch inputs.

Smartphones are so convenient and versatile, though. I can't imagine any kind of device replacing them.

OTOH Opera mobile supports text reflowing after zoom (to be enabled in settings). It's a compile time feature of Blink and I'm baffled why one else supports it. It eats a bit more battery to reflow on each zoom but come on.

She couldn't add her phone number to her account, because her phone number was already registered in an old (2013) account of hers that she didn't remember existed, and she didn't remember the credentials.

Once she found a way to log into the old account, she was unable to remove her phone number from it without adding in a new number. We had to add my phone number to her old account so that we could use her number in her current account. We couldn't add a 'fake' number because it requires SMS verification.

So, I guess I will not be able to add my phone number to Airbnb if I ever want to use it.

I suppose they do it like this so that phone numbers can be used as username, but they end up pushing this kind of problem onto their users. We were in a hurry and it really was not the appropiate moment for Airbnb to act stupid.

I can somewhat comfortably read HN (though it is a touch small); it's 12px/9pt. I wouldn't recommend anything less than 10pt myself for normal text.

I did hit a site recently whose main copy was 9px, and that was quite annoying, I agree there.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/

The headlines are so large that I have to move my head to read them.

And zooming out doesn't reduce the font-size, it just makes headlines narrower to the point where they're one word under another while I still need to move my head around to read them. Except when zoomed out, I still need to move my head horizontally, but now vertically too.

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uifont/scali...

> The working group feels that 200% is a reasonable accommodation that can support a wide range of designs and layouts, and complements older screen magnifiers that provide a minimum magnification of 200%. Above 200%, zoom (which resizes text, images, and layout regions and creates a larger canvas that may require both horizontal and vertical scrolling) may be more effective than text resizing. Assistive technology dedicated to zoom support would usually be used in such a situation and may provide better accessibility than attempts by the author to support the user directly.

A lot of things in UI are like this, but given the way the web has developed, it's particularly true. The article goes over some of this, although I think it kind of assumes the reader is more or less familiar with some of the issues that come up, but it could probably still give a naive reader some idea.

- Scaling / reshaping a UI is a fundamentally hard problem that people love to pretend is easy. There are all kinds of tradeoffs that need to be made based on the layout. Which text needs to be preserved? When is it appropriate to show ellipsis? Should padding be dynamic? Apart from CSS another major attempt was GridBagLayout in early Java, which was also a mess.

- Designers tend to be visual arts people who aren't of the correct personality type to dive in and solve all of the nitty gritty issues when making their design. They also like to make complex designs to show how creative they are. They also use their superior social skills to rope high level people to develop and approve the designs with them so that things are final before a dev gets to have a look. Once that happens ego comes into play and they can't be simplified.

- CSS fundamentally doesn't have the correct tools to solve a lot of the issues. CSS first came out in 1996. Line clamping seems like an obvious problem to solve. Yet 28 years later we're still stuck with a prefixed -webkit-line-clamp. In general CSS sees overflowing text as a problem it doesn't want to deal with.

Without requiring horizontal scrolling?

I thought it just set the initial zoom with initial scale, but didn't prevent zooming in further? But I don't pinch zoom websites much, and maybe I haven't tested my own in a while... googling the usual sources are not clarifying to me the interaction of all these things according to standard.

I don't think I prefer it most of the time, as scrolling is annoying. But it is super useful for sites that break the browser-default scrolling.

This is the problem though, unfortunately. People aren't even talking about the same thing. Users need to increase their font size so they can read comfortably. But so many people seem to think "zoom" should do what you describe (like zooming in to see small details?). I suppose the best is that web browsers offer both modes. But unfortunately text zoom requires some understanding from the web developer to work (or just a simple web site; a little knowledge is a dangerous thing). So we get stuck with stupid zoom because half the web breaks if you dare to change front size.

Users can select their preferred font sizes

Browser vendors actively disrupted these features for decades, cause most of them became biggest sales/tracking platforms.

Most web design today is driven by branding. Everyone seems to feel like they have to be express their uniqueness. This is awful and can widely be regarded as a bad move. I fully agree with you on that front.

On the other hand, the default browser styles are bad in their own way. Look at http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ for details. In practice, some degree of web design is necessary.

Also, you can create art and beauty on a computer. A well designed website can elevate the experience, just like a well designed book or chair.

Finally, HTML is limited in what it can do. JavaScript, CSS, and WAI-ARIA together form the low-level technologies to extend the web with new functionality. See https://extensiblewebmanifesto.org/ for details.

In summary, I would say that most web design is useless, but not all of it.