IE7 finally made it easy to scale up/scale down the font size (‘ctrl’-‘+’, ‘ctrl’-‘-‘, or the ‘100%’ situated at the bottom right of the screen). Long time coming!
The IE7-team elected to go with “page zooming” instead of “font scaling” for this. This means not only the fonts go up in size, everything does. Opera 9 has this feature, and it works like a charm. A real bonus for the users: they can scale up, always, even if the designer had the anal idea of controlling his intended minuscule font-size in pixels or in images.
And then the IE7 implementation came around. It’s an unfinished work! Just look at a few of the horrible consequences it has on the layout of the website I work for (fluid layout, ems-based, so that it would scale together with the font-size the user chooses to look at the site in).
Just look at these (screenshots are from this page):
Everything scales, except for the page background (the vdab-logo is an image, blended in to the background):
The crumbtrail below is a bunch of <li>’s, text with a border-bottom, and a background image with padding/margin to have the text next to it:
And, cream of the crop, these are just a bunch of radio buttons and labels, stacked
Some blogbuzz/discussions on this:
- Firefox and Safari, implement the Zoom feature! Just make sure you do it better than IE7. Please!
- Zeldman article about the consequences of hacks on IE7-layouts.
- IE7: Were they ready? Quick check on a sample of websites to see how many break in IE7.
- IE 7 Bug #001
Houbi.Me 
Leave it to Microsoft to screw something up.
Thanks for this info. I use Firefox and use IE6 for testing. I was wondering if IE took care of font scaling.
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