No, no. You are quiet wrong on that account. This is a very dear issue to me, so let me get into a little more detail.
It creates all sorts of problems. CSS based design using some of the most fundamental tools as Positioning and Flow is dependent on the choice of fixed or scalable units. If the coder chooses a fixed unit it is because they don't want that element to be scaled. And more often than not, they base their design on that decision. Other elements on the page may have scalable units on their own and the mix of the two is a powerful design feature that allows for the coder to control how the page elements should behave when enlarged.Originally Posted by Elysia
The above is concerning Web Accessibility Standards. But there's also simple design decisions; The more complex liquid page layouts depend on a careful choice of dimension unit types for them to work. It's common for these layouts to employ both unit types and flow correctly as the user reduces or enlarges the browser viewport. On the presence of a full zoom feature, their decision concerning those elements where fixed units where used is broken. Suddenly their liquid layout just doesn't work (and has no hope of working) when the user scales the contents sometimes even if by one increment.
Scaling text has been at the heart of web accessibility decisions. It always worked. What some designers choose to do is to compromise in the presence of some layouts like the one shown on my previous post. That is, they allow for a certain degree of text enlargement until the layout gets broken. This has always been like this and unless a webpage is made up of just text flowing from left to right and up to bottom, most layouts will eventually break at higher levels of text enlargement.Originally Posted by Elysia
It's a conscious decision, not a bug in the HTML/CSS code. And it derives from the limitations of the languages themselves as well as the limitations of computer screen sizes (a larger resolution will allow for bigger enlargements without breaking the layout).
I'm not sure what to say here other than you perhaps are distracted. First it is not true, for all the reasons above, unless FF3 new zoom feature creates horizontal scroll. Second it can be true only in the sense few designers worry about web accessibility and thus do not predict text enlargement usage patterns when coding their sites which definitely breaks most layouts as soon as a user enlarges the text. EDIT: But this also breaks in the presence of zoom equally.Originally Posted by Elysia
The thing to retain here is that this is just not me being picky about a zoom feature. It is much more than that. It touches the core of webpage coding decisions. One cannot code for a zoom feature simply because the HTML/CSS combination doesn't offer the tools to handle different image sizes. Again, providing the example on my previous post I have no way whatsoever short of using javascript to handle the new image and surrounding div dimensions when the user zooms the page, as opposed to enlarging the text which CSS offers plenty of tools.
To conclude on another note however, this is not to say Zoom is not a good feature. It is indeed. But the problem in Opera is the fact it is the only feature which simply means Opera in non standard in this issue. If Opera allowed for text enlargement only, with our without a Zoom feature, I wouldn't be here having this conversation.