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Comment by drivebyacct2 | Hacker News Reader

We just went through this like a week or two ago. Yeesh. Every browser I use has support for text resizing, default text sizes, or zoom levels. Android WebKit has double-tap and reflow.

I don't see why this is a problem demanding such rants.

Ironically the first thing I did when the page loaded was tap Ctrl+- Ctrl+-.

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The browsers I use most -- Safari on iPhone and iPad -- do not allow this. The only way to increase font size is to zoom the entire page, which often results in lines that are too wide for the screen.

And a growing number of websites take deliberate steps to prevent any zooming on the page. I can't understand why any designer thinks this is helpful.

At least iOS Safari has "reader" mode now, which does what I wish most websites would do: throw away all of the CSS, and render the page as a plain list of H1's and P's.

Yes unfortunately there is a set of meta tags you can use to set things like default and max zoom level for the page. If they're both at 1.0, you can't zoom at all. I'm not sure who thought that was a good idea to standardize, but if I meet them they will not be receiving a beer.

There is/was a bug pre iOS 6 where if you set a custom zoom level, some content may be chopped off when you change orientation. Naturally people wanted to stop this happening, so they disabled zooming. Unfortunately this effected every mobile platform.

Thing is, most people don't know how to zoom a website on a desktop browser. On mobile browsers it's even worse and almost nobody will bother with the pinching and tapping and panning just to read some text, unless they _really_ have to.

If you are running a website, I encourage you to test different font sizes and measure the difference in engagement. You might be surprised.

This trend towards ridiculously large font sizes is becoming exceedingly annoying. There's been so many articles about it, and many pseudo-techy (trendy) blogs are adopting the large size. 16pt minimum? Really? There's a reason that so few sites and text editors use that by default. It may look great on your retina display but on 99% of screens out there it just makes your site look like it's aimed towards kids.

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