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by dlazar 5452 days ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "scaling". Just because it uses a media query to serve a different style based on the screen size doesn't mean it "scales well".

In particular, this reacts quite badly to zooming, either in a desktop browser (chrome/linux): http://imgur.com/r1z9W or in a mobile browser (android): http://imgur.com/7aP39 .

In the desktop case, the font size doesn't change even if I zoom in the entire page. This isn't the default behavior, so the author must have gone to some lengths to break this functionality. I'm sure s/he had reasons for doing that, but I'm not sure what they were.

In the mobile case, zooming is constrained to a very limited range, and even when allowed, the text doesn't reflow, so it's hard to read lines because of all of the horizontal scrolling required. This behavior is quite common for fixed width, "grid" layouts.

In general, I'm all for frameworks that solve common layout problems, but this particular framework seems to have gotten the basics wrong. I would recommend against using it as it stands.

4 comments

Thanks for the explanation. I don't own a smartphone or have experience with media queries, so this was one of my first times seeing media queries in action and I'm easily impressed.

By "love the scaling", I guess I meant "I love media queries."

Agreed. The framework looks fantastic but that is definitely a deal breaker. Zooming in on the web to see text larger is such a huge use-case.
That's a really good analysis of the current limitations of this framework. I'm wondering whether you happened to send this criticism to Skeleton's creator to see if it's something he's aware of, or something that he intends to improve.
Looks like Dave Gamache pushed an update to address zooming.

https://twitter.com/#!/dhg/statuses/92687926823092224