Disabling Text Resizing In Browsers

mjs416's picture

They have: 127 posts

Joined: Dec 2003

Greetings all.

I have been playing with web design for a few years now, and have recently decided to start a side business. I began hand coding everything, then moved to Frontpage (YUCK!!) then finally I have been using fireworks and dreamweaver the past 6 months. WOW, macromedia really knows their stuff.

Anyways, I have noticed that if you resize the font (IE: using View-> Text Size -> then smallest, small, medium, large, etc.) to a larger size, it throws my tables and cells all out of whack. I then went to msn.com, and tried making the font larger to see how thorough microsoft is with their coding and the text resizing had no effect. Immediately I figured there was some code in the page that disabled the text resizing option, but after several minutes of inspecting the code, I found nothing.

My question is this, Is there a way to disable that option or set the text size to a default size in the browser? Does CSS (which I am not very familar with) do this? If so, I thought CSS was not cross browser compatible.

If anyone could answer these questions for me, I would appreciate it. I do not want a client with bad eyes to goto my home page and see a disjointed mess. Thanks =)

Busy's picture

He has: 6,151 posts

Joined: May 2001

I believe your talking about using px size fonts which dont like to be resized in IE, but does in other browsers.

Try find another way around this, instead of gluing your fonts, try make use of justify or something as many many people have eye/vision problems and need the ability to increase font size. Ideally not using any font tags (html or CSS) is easier to control as it's similar in most browsers.
CSS is cross browser compatible to a degree and is getting better everyday.

mjs416's picture

They have: 127 posts

Joined: Dec 2003

Another method I have seen on a couple sites is to use a graphic for your text. For example, instead of having a paragraph with Verdana, size 1 text, you could write the paragraph in Photoshop and save it as a GIF or JPEG and simply insert the pic into a desired cell. I really dont want to use that approach as it makes updating and editing the site a pain in the butt, and it adds to the total download time which can really suck if you are on low connection speed dial up.

Suzanne's picture

She has: 5,507 posts

Joined: Feb 2000

Using graphics for text will, thankfully, seriously harm your rankings in search engines.

Don't use px, don't use graphics, just code better. Using px is less painful than graphics, and again thankfully, only affects IE users -- every other 5.x+ browser out there resizes pixels as well.

What you're messing with is thinking the web is print and not thinking of the zillions of ways a user can access the content (from cellphones to different operating systems and browsers), and not realizing that your audience is not made up only of people with perfect vision and similar preferences to your own. Accessibility, printing, readability are all compromised when designer ego takes precedence above user requirements.

If you post your sites, we can help explain how to make your sites work properly at various text sizes.

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