possible to auto zoom out if user's resolution < x? - javascript

my site is aimed purely at the laptop market (dont ask why or argue!), all my users (or 95%+) we on a screen width of 1200+,
netbooks are now taking off, with a resolution of 1024 wide.
my site still looks great on a netbook if you zoom out once (ctrl-minus), but i don't want to rely on users knowing about ctrl-minus.
what are my options besides redesign? I'm keen not to have zoom buttons on my page.
is there a javascript zoomer outer?!!!

While this doesn't sort out your zoom, you could try a little trick based on CSS & relative sizing.
If you have an image or a container that is 100px wide, try setting it to 10em wide (or faff with the em amount until you find the appropriate value). Eventually, if you do this to every single dimension specified upon your site, you'd be able to actively shrink the page by changing the default font-size. E.g. from 1em, to 0.91em.
People often use the relative sizing to allow people the flexibility of being able to shrink and grow font sizes as they want. It's not as commonly used on images (because they are by requirement, fixed in size). This needn't be the case though, and in this instance, might offer you a way out of a "full site redesign" and giving the effect of "zooming".
This might solve the problem without redesign, but may be tricky and would require a bit of testing. The way stylesheets cascade, shrinking the font a little more, element by element, might cause a few issues.

detect screen resolution via JS
apply appropriate CSS
ctrl + - is the browser feature and you should never rely on that.
try this article http://www.alistapart.com/articles/alternate/
or try to google "javascript switch css"

this is a bad idea for many reasons. zooming is client specific so you will run into cross browser compatibilities if even possible at all. your best bet is to use css and set a min and/or max width. you don't need to redesign but (assuming proper html structure and usage of external css) changing some width values should do the trick.

Related

Progressive width resizing: is this for aesthetic or technical reasons?

Not that I want to promote buydomains.com (actually I despise their business model) but need to show it to illustrate my question, sorry.
I came across this website on which when you resize your browser window's width up/down, the elements' get slowly resized up/down (I'm guessing via JavaScript), until they seem to fit in an optimum way:.
For instance, resizing up the browser width, you can see that the "Researchhighlights" search box's width progressively reduces until the below elements fit on the same line:
I'm used to CSS responsive design where elements are resized and re-arranged instantly when certain break points are reached, so I'm wondering whether this method is an alternative to CSS responsive design (and if so what the pros/cons are) by letting JavaScript figure out the optimum elements' width.
Is there a technical reason behind this implementation?*
**since JavaScript has the capability of doing such processing instantly the fact that elements are re-sized slowly definitely seems to be some sort of aesthetic decision (otherwise why make people wait if you can do things faster), however there might still be some technical reason behind it.*
First of all, the same effects can be achieved using CSS, so this is not a JavaScript vs. CSS-based responsive design situation.
The decision to slow down the transitions is purely a design decision - there are no technical limitations on doing it instantly.
In my opinion (and experience), slow transitions are more annoying than aesthetically pleasing, especially on a "utility" website. Also, a screen resize event is relatively rare - most users do not resize a screen during their visit. When users do resize it (for example, by turning a tablet), they expect an instantaneous adjustment. I see no reason not to meet their expectations.

how are these columns changing their configuration without javascript

I was looking around for a way to arrange content differently depending on screen size when I noticed this site. Quite a nice looking site too. As I change my browser's size, the column configuration changes? When I reduce to the very minimum size or visit it on a phone, the large image on top disappears completely, leaving only the small icons. I've turned off javascript, and this still happens. Also, it works in my ie8, so I'm guessing it's not an HTML5 thang. How is it being done?
Thanks!
This effect is not being done by Javascript, instead it is being done by CSS #media queries. Chris Coyier of CSS Tricks has a great intro to #media queries
Simply, it allows you to specify the scope of a stylesheet based on some boolean expression (such as checking if the window width is a specific width used in that example you saw) and then apply specific styles thus making it responsive design

JQuery lightbox plugin: Scaling very large images to fit screen

I'm using the jQuery "Lightbox" plugin, although I don't know if that's necessary information about the problem at hand.
The images I'm putting through my slideshow are quite large; each of them is far larger than the screen (I don't host the images on my server so I cannot resize them). I need to scale them to fit within the bounds of the screen (probably with some margin as well). Are there some JQuery or other Javascript snippets out there to take care of this?
Edit
Now I use "zoombox", which certainly fixes the scaling issue. However, now all the nice slideshow features are lost! I.e., I cannot use the arrow keys or cycle through the gallery of images!
Here are three plugins which are pretty feature rich and widely used, they should do the job with ease :
http://www.jacklmoore.com/colorbox
http://fancybox.net/
http://www.grafikart.fr/zoombox
Edit: Pretty much every lightbox solution is listed and compared at : http://planetozh.com/projects/lightbox-clones/
I've settled on Floatbox after testing out a dozen of these libraries. The default settings size the image to fit the screen and allow navigation with the arrow keys. Clicking on an image zooms it to 100%. It's easily configurable in terms of colors, window decorations, and the like.
I forked Lightbox2 to include automatic scaling.
Now, if an image is larger than the window, it will automatically resize to 80%.
You can find it here, on my new repo.

How to obtain 'Ctrl +' behavior on a browser using Javascript?

I opened the Stack Overflow website on my 47 inch LCD TV (resolution 1920 * 1080, 16:9) and found the text and website right in the middle of a lot of whitespace. The text was unreadable because Stack Overflow, like many other websites, is optimized for standard 1200/1024 viewports.
In order to make the website readable, I pressed 'ctrl' and '+' keys and sort of got the content to occupy more screen width. I am sure this is not "zoom in" because what the browser is actually doing is scale up the content size (i.e. reduces the no. of pixels per character).
Can this 'ctrl +' behavior be achieved using Javascript as a pre-render exercise after detecting the resolution/size parameter of the viewport?
Update: I tried #media-queries which scales font-sizes and other few things, but it doesn't help to scale images and rest of the content (such as padding etc.) in a balanced way. Most importantly, it doesn't satisfy the condition to restrict the size of a given div to say "610px and yet occupy 75%" of the available screen-width.
Which is like a resolution change if we press ctrl + on Gecko/Webkit based browsers. Sorry can't accept the answer below.
Mostly yes.
IE6,7 have zoom and IE8 has -ms-zoom
Everyone else has 2D transforms and scale() so you're covered. see zoom css/javascript
I havent seen anyone apply this sort of effect to the entire document, so things might be buggy. Enjoy!
I'm sure it's possible with javascript, as most things seem to be, but I think that this is the exact kind of problem that CSS Media Queries were specifically designed to solve.
Check out the article on Responsive Web Design over at A List Apart

Can I zoom into a web page like IE or Firefox do, using programming?

Simple - I have a layout that is 800 by 600. When I press Ctrl and +, it zooms in and looks wonderful.
I want to know if there's a CSS/Javascript way to do the same? Without the user having to do it (because users will not do it and see the small layout).
Same question was posted by someone Setting IE "Optical Zoom" feature using Javascript/CSS that got no good replies.
There is a zoom CSS property, but it is part of CSS3 and is most likely not widely supported. By setting this on the body element using JavaScript you can zoom the entire page.
I would agree with the sentiments of the answers to the question you linked to though in that it should be up to the user to choose their own zoom settings. If your site is too big/small to see, it indicates a problem with your site design.
You can set all sizes as dynamic (use em for fonts, % for divs/images sizes). Then change the main wrapper and the main font size using javascript.
You can also use CSS switching. Put all the colors and such in one css file. Then create 3 or 4 levels of zoom and inside hardcode different sizes for all the existing classes.
Example:
main.css
a{color:red;}
small.css
a{font-size:10px;}
medium.css
a{font-size:12px;}
Not all designs (in fact I'd wager, none, without targeted style sheets) can cope with the vastly different sizes of screen out there today, from portrait orientated screens at public libraries, to ultra fine artworking Macs with giant landscape screens and tiny little laptops - the latter two often used by executives that have NO understanding of how the zoom features in a browser work and also often have terrible eye sight and little patience.
My suggestion is to use relative sizing like Marcgg suggests. If you're really looking to be super flexible the you could use javascript or browserhawk (or equivalent) to measure the screen sizes and switch out style sheets for those that are really not going to work with your layout.

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