Not really related to the article, but would you look at that web page. This is what all of them should look like! Nothing fancy, just good content, 64.91KB in total.
That's because your browser sucks. Try Opera Mobile or something similar. Good browsers can reflow text to fit whatever screen size they display at. This website has zero CSS related to layout, so it is your browser's duty to render it nicely.
It boggles my mind why reflow is not one of the most important and most highly regarded features of any mobile browser.
The problem is quickly solved on Firefox thanks to its "Fit text to width" addon [1].
>it is your browser's duty to render it nicely
I think browsers should have the ultimate say on how to display websites, according to the user's preferences (think of text size and colors). Sadly, with websites gradually transforming into "web apps", users are losing control.
even after 'zooming in'?
it didn't create a new viewport for me after doing that that.
on opera mobile: are you truly comfortable to use a 'default on man-in-the-middle-ware' from china? (it proxies everything and compresses it, to save data bandwidth)
i stopped using it in August because of that. might've been too paranoid though.
Yeah, they should add the meta/viewport with scale=1 tag to the head, and it would improve readability on phones. I mean it't annoying that the web is in a state where that is necessary, but until it's solved, it's better (and not much more difficult) than nothing.