Surf*Mind*Musings

An important aspect of parity, both within the browser space and in the rich internet app / mashup space, Full Page Zoom (the bug) has come to Firefox 3.

The always crafty Daniel Glazman writes:

The fullZoom feature of Firefox 3 is cool. Very cool. It’s so cool that combined with the marvelous extensibility of Firefox, I think many extensions are going to use it and offer a wide set of new features based on it.

The extension is for Firefox 3 betas and zooms to the region where your mouse is when you right-click and zoom.

Suprisingly, IE has had some really nice zoom capacities for years with *.style.zoom. I crafted a resolution tester back in ‘04. The IE implementation is a bit different than Firefox’s, seeming to render at scale and then reduce near the graphics layer.

In a potentially nifty implementation for custom reading solutions & accessibility, Firefox seems to scale the page atomically. The full scale and then manipulate approach is available and demo’ed by Mark Finkle in SVG using Foreign Object, but the rotated & scaled demo is still pretty slow on my current mbp and the latest nightly.

Hat’s off to Daniel for finding a great use case for using DOM boundaries to provide a valuable user feature. Recognizing meaningful content by layout schema is a pretty tractable problem, and the DOM extents are in general rich with information. Using IDs to recognize unique UI elements and repeated CSS classes to recognize UI components is a nicely generic solution – more in Edmonds, A., White, R., Morris, D., Drucker, S. Instrumenting the Dynamic Web. Journal of Web Engineering (JWE), Vol. 6, No. 3 (2007), 243-260.

With a 17″ MacBook coming my way on Monday, with the 1900×1200 screen upgrade, I’ll likely be a heavy zoom user. I do have a wide screen browsing Mozilla prototype deriviant hacked up in Adobe AIR (demo vid) with side scrolling.