270920 - Increasing text size causes webpage menu items to overlap / display incorrectly

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Dan]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

If you open the www.rheumatology.org homepage and increase the Text Size (Ctrl
+), the menus on the left side end up overlapping. 

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open www.rheumatology.org
2. Increase text size (View / Text Size / Increase)
3. The menu on the left will eventually become unreadable.



Expected Results:  
Mozilla should check whether the increased font size still allows the text
string to fit into the available space. If the new size would cause it not to
fit anymore, it should keep it unchanged, even if the user will still increase
the font size.

I only saw it on this website, it may be related to it ... However, IE doesn't
increase the fonts enough to get to this error.

Comment 1

[Dan]

Attachment: Big fonts - the menu gets garbled

Comment 2

[Dan]

Attachment: This is the default size

Comment 3

[Felix Miata]

Attachment: screenshot - 22px default font size, 17px minimum font size

For this screenshot, minimum font size is set to approximately 3/4 of the
user's 22px default, 17px. System is running 120 DPI.

The page is poorly designed, using a complex mixture of tables and CSS for
layout. The web is a fluid medium. CSS was designed for this fluid medium. The
page's author seems to think CSS is a page layout language for a non-fluid
medium, which simply does not work nicely on the web. The page has invalid
HTML. Before anything else, the author should run the HTML through a validator
and fix the broken markup. Then he needs to rewrite the CSS to conform to the
medium, and not size so many containers with px. When containers are sized with
px, users who force fonts to be big enough to read break the layout, causing
overlapping & inaccessible content, as we find here. This author is mixing pt,
px and % to size fonts, which can create some really bad effects. In any event,
authors should never use pt to size screen media text.

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

This is invalid.  We shouldn't be failing to increase the font size when the
user requests it simply because the page is poorly designed... The user can
decide which they find more readable for themselves.