Safari text reflowformatting revisited iPhone

jc1742

2010-12-16 12:25:02

About a year ago, I asked about problems with web pages text formatting and/or reflow in Safari, and didnt really get an answer. The problem has gotten worse with the advent of iPhones with different screen resolutions (320x480, 640x960).
The problem is that web pages from several sites Im working on are rendered on the iPhone by Safari in either a tiny unreadable font, or if you resize the screen, a legible font but a window thats much wider than the screen, requiring left-right scrolling to read. Users find this really unacceptable, of course, and want it fixed.
When I asked before, the proposed solution was <meta name=viewport content=width=320> in the pages <head> section. This sorta worked, but has the problem that when you rotate the phone, you get the text in a huge font, and shrinking it is simply undone by Safari.
But we now have clients with the newer iPhones, and the above semi-solution doesnt work very well for them at all. So Im trying to learn whether theres a solution now. Is there a way to get Safari to render web pages with the text at a font size chosen by the user, and flowed to fit the iPhones screen width, whatever it is?
The weird thing here is that this is something that most browsers have done from the start. The main design goal of the original HTML over two decades ago was handling different-sized screens (or windows). The very first browsers (Mosaic, etc.) did flowing of the text to fit whatever size window widget they were running in. If you resize a browsers window, all the others I know of will quickly reflow the text so its the same font size and fits the new window size.
But iPhones Safari seems to stand alone in not doing this. It formats the text for a window much larger than the screen, and then shrinks it to fit the current width (i.e., portrait/landscape mode).
But is this actually true? Is there some way to tell Safari to do the usual sort of formatting to fit the current screen size and shape/layout? The <meta> tag doesnt do this, and has the problem that it cant know the size of the clients screen, which is no longer the same on all iPhones.
Googling turns up a lot of questions and complaints about this, but no solutions. My earlier question also stands unanswered. But its more of a problem now, with more than one iPhone screen resolution in users hands.
(And why does the Apple Discussions input form want to know my Macbook Pros OS level? This is a question about iPhone software, and our web pages arent delivered by my Macbook Pro, even if I do develop a lot of them there.
Macbook Pro Mac OS X (10.5.8)

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RE:Safari text reflowformatting revisited iPhone

carltonzone

2010-12-16 12:25:02

JC, the lack of text reflow on the Safari browser has been the biggest sore spot with me regarding my iPhones for the past 2 years. I have written a couple of blog pages about this over on my website (http://www.carltonzone.com, then click on the technology tab to pull up all of my gadget posts). Someone turned my attention to the Atomic browser which does reflow text, not upon zooming, but when you increase the font size. It works great on mobile-compliant sites, but not as well on standard websites. This is obviously an easy fix for Apple, but they apparently dont see it as beneficial. Their argument is that the Retina display is so clear, you dont need to zoom in to see things better. Common sense should tell you that even infinite resolution (for example, +printed text+???) is not readable when its in microscopic font size.
Even though we now have a solution with the Atomic broser, I still think this should be added to the Safari browser for the simple fact that people want it.
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