3 ms·

200% font scaling sounds so innocent and fundamental. Is it hard because they waited too long and have too many teams / frontend systems? Or is font scaling CSS

200% font scaling sounds so innocent and fundamental. Is it hard because they waited too long and have too many teams / frontend systems? Or is font scaling CSS just tough for everybody?

fwip 2y ago
From the WCAG 2.1 specification they cite: > 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.
SuperNinKenDo 2y ago
It is tough for everybody. It's one of those pernicious things that sounds simple until you try it and start to realise just how many assumptions about the relationship between things are baked into both your mental model, as well as tooling. 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.
wmil 2y ago
It's the intersection of a few problems. - 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.

200% font scaling sounds so innocent and fundamental. Is it hard because they waited too long and have too many teams / frontend systems? Or is font scaling CSS just tough for everybody?

fwip 2y ago

From the WCAG 2.1 specification they cite: > 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.

SuperNinKenDo 2y ago

It is tough for everybody. It's one of those pernicious things that sounds simple until you try it and start to realise just how many assumptions about the relationship between things are baked into both your mental model, as well as tooling. 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.

wmil 2y ago

It's the intersection of a few problems. - 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.