Mobile Web
I do not understand something about the mobile web. The ‘mobile web’ entails all the sites made for smart phones and other mobile devices. Despite being designed for small screens, most mobile site disable the best feature on mobile browsers, the pinch zoom.
This makes no sense to me. How could this benefit mobile web users in any way? Taking away features is not a great idea to begin with, so removing the capacity to zoom in on small screen is simply foolish.
Instead of disabling zoom, mobile web sites (and mobile browsers) ought to be looking into text zoom. The iPhone’s default zoom, like that in most browsers, is a full zoom, acting like a magnifying glass. While useful, full zoom usually means a lot of panning left and right to read the text. Firefox (as well as Adobe Reader and mist eBook reader) offer a much better alternative, text zoom. Text zoom is not really a zoom. What happens when thus feature is used is that the text size is increases while keeping the page structure intact. In plain English, the page width and all images stay the same size. The end result is that a reader does not have to pan back and forth to read a page that has been ‘text zoomed’.
Adobe has implemented this in Reader as Reflow. This feature is hidden at the. Bottom of the Zoom submenu of the View menu. Reflow only works on properly formatted PDF files of which there are far too few.
The Kindle, as do most eBook readers, uses text zoom when users change font sizes. The width of the page stays the same. There are just feet(though larger and easier to read) words on each page. There is no need for scrolling back and forth while reading.
So, all you mobile web developers and designers, get zooming!
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