[ceejayoz]

> It's awful for usability

The scaling behaviour can be just as bad for usability on a site that's been well optimized already for mobile display.

As an example, iOS zooms when you select a text input field. If I've already adjusted the design to work nicely at 320px wide, the zooming is unnecessary, makes the page look odd, and the user has to manually zoom back out when they dismiss the keyboard. Another problem example is where the "zoom" multi-touch events conflict with something like Google Maps - should the browser zoom the page, or the map div?

Disabling zooming just makes it function more like a dedicated app - they don't zoom either. If you want to take away people's programming qualifications for making positive steps towards usability, I'm glad you're not in charge of the professional standards.

[jodrellblank]

If you've fixed the design to 320px that's about half the width of my phone screen and a quarter of a portrait tablet screen.

Dedicated Apps are dedicated to my device, mobile web pages aren't.

Mobile Safari doesn't automatically zoom because Apple were to rushed to take that feature out, it auto zooms because Apple went out of their way to add it. Same with the phone/tablet/whatever. You don't know why I'm zooming either, maybe I'm in a moving vehicle or using it at night in low brightness and can't see well, or without glasses or when tired or while holding something else and viewing at a distance or anything.

As a principle, content is there to be used not to be aesthetically perfect, and content overriding the local display device is giving control to someone without the context to make useful decisions.

I know apps don't zoom - haven't we been complaining about resolution independence in desktops and implementing magnifiers and ctrl-scroll and other clunky workarounds because of this for many many years?

[ceejayoz]

> If you've fixed the design to 320px that's about half the width of my phone screen and a quarter of a portrait tablet screen.

Take a look at Twitter's Bootstrap. It has a variety of different responsive design levels, not just one at 320px. Great example of how a design can fit many different devices.

> Mobile Safari doesn't automatically zoom because Apple were to rushed to take that feature out, it auto zooms because Apple went out of their way to add it.

Yes, and the reasons they did are good ones - many sites don't have a responsive design.

You know what else Apple went out of their way to add? The ability for a web developer to disable the zooming feature!

> ... maybe I'm in a moving vehicle or using it at night in low brightness and can't see well, or without glasses or when tired or while holding something else and viewing at a distance or anything ...

A trade-off I'm willing to deal with. There are accessibility features in iOS and Android for most of those situations, so I'm fairly comfortable making the site work best for most people instead of the small number edge cases.

[jodrellblank]

You know what else Apple went out of their way to add? The ability for a web developer to disable the zooming feature!

Implementing a complete specification isn't "going out of your way", it's very much in your way. It's also not saying you endorse every feature therein. (From a quick search, this appears to be a part of CSS specifications: http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-device-adapt/#the-lsquouser-zoom... ). Creating features from scratch is going out of your way. And creating features which allow you to zoom in on any site feels like a strong endoresement that zooming in is generally useful.

Take a look at Twitter's Bootstrap. It has a variety of different responsive design levels, not just one at 320px. Great example of how a design can fit many different devices.

More sites aren't designed well than sites which are designed well. I'd rather put my moment by momnent usability of something ahead of the designer's musing about what "should be more usable" any day. And the abuse of such a thing is to disable zoom for the designer's sense of aesthetics over the user's sense of usability, and I suggest that happens much more than the designer using it to increase usability. And that's a trade-off I dislike having to deal with.

[ceejayoz]

It's a proposed part of the CSS spec because Apple created the viewport meta tag. I'd call that "creating features from scratch". Go on, find an example of the viewport tag prior to the implementation in iOS.