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Comment by MrScruff | Hacker News Reader

I imagine this is an intentional omission based on Apple's own research. Personally, while I'm not in the market for an iPad mini it would irritate me if developers tried to treat it as a separate target for layouts. The whole point is it's supposed to be a (slightly) more compact iPad but behave identically.

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Or based on the frustration of iPhone users being punted onto second rate "mobile sites" when the full site in Safari with a bit of zooming is absolutely fine.

Don't give people any more information which they're likely to use to do dumb things?

This is the paradox of platforms in general: the more you empower smart, nice devs, the more you also empower not-so-smart, not-so-nice devs.

Agreed.

With this though I'm not hearing any argument that suggests there's a compelling reason to distinguish based on this platform. I'm not saying that there isn't one, just that in a situation like that the chances are there will be a lot more implementations that do something stupid with it than do something good.

I tend to side with empowering devs by default (of course), but I see your point. Readability should be addressed with adjustable fonts on all devices anyway. The only possible case I could see is augmented-reality stuff where the real size matters, maybe such as rendering a ruler to the screen. An edge case, admittedly, but if it were my edge case, I'd be pissed.

I'd certainly never say don't do something because devs can't be trusted with it, though I don't think that's Apple's logic here.

If it's an intentional thing I think they genuinely (possibly mistakenly but genuinely) believe that it's unnecessary rather than that it would be useful but abused.

I can appreciate a mobile version when the site has a lot of art assets and I'm on a cellular connection.

OTOH, if someone says "your site is too small to read on a mini", I'm not sure what good answer you have, except to make it bigger for everyone.

There is no "site too small to read" on iOS unless you deliberately mess up zoom values.

Heh. Have you looked at Hacker News on an iPhone? Zoom doesn't do much good when you have to pan and zoom to read each line of text.

I think that falls under "deliberately using crap HTML" ;)

Funny, I was just reading this on an iPhone and it's completely legible (even in portrait mode).

Your eyes must be better than mine, because I have to hold my phone about 4 inches from my eyes to read it, and even then it's too small to be comfortable for more than a few seconds. And on a non-retina screen, it's just hopeless.

Voting is really hard too. I just don't bother voting anymore on iDevices until there is at least a 40x40 button I can use with my stubby fingers.

The Subtle network, on an iPad2, in portrait. Somehow, they manage to cut off the text of the body column.

So, not exactly too small, but too narrow.

That's a design failure (position:fixed also makes it crap), but it's not related to text/element size anyway.

People tend to think that everything that Apple does is part of some kind of masterplan. They're humans too, and this is clearly a feature missing on their development environment.

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