Last modified: 2013-06-18 15:25:05 UTC
I'm a frequent user of the mobile Wikipedia website, en.m.wikipedia.org. I noticed a few days ago, around 1-Dec-2010, that I was no longer able to zoom in on the text on most pages. Since I'm using a device with a small screen this is quite annoying. After a little research I found that it may due to the viewport meta tag in the html header: <meta name = "viewport" content = "width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0;"> <meta name = "viewport" content = "user-scalable=0;" /> I think it should be for the end user to decide how he/she likes the pages to be shown, and on a project like Wikipedia, the actual textual content should be more important than graphical design constraints. Besides enlarging the text for easier reading, it's also nice to be able to zoom in to hit a link more precisely. Here is a similar discussion about Google Reader: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4113 Hope you'll change the setting back, so I still can enjoy Wikipedia on my smart phone. :-)
Hampton, was this decision discussed anywhere? Has there been any reconsideration?
Yes, this decision was made because of the way that the application behaves if you don't enable it. We were having lots of issues where the initial zooming was insane. And the user-scalable option was determined to be the culprit. Any page with a large table or a large image on it was coming out looking very strange.
I must agree with bakkedal here. I'm also a frequent user of Wikipedia and I access it mostly from an Android phone. My eye-sight isn't that good so I need to pinch-zoom the page to be able to read the text. Considering that I'm in my thirties, I imagine it's going to be an even bigger problem for older people. If the issue is bad page layout of large tables or images, why not contact the respective developers about that instead? https://bugs.webkit.org/ https://bugs.opera.com/wizard/ https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ For the record, I haven't noticed any issues of that sort when using Opera Mobile or the Android stock browser.
This was addressed a long time ago The viewport now only defines an initial scale (see most recent change to viewport at http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki?view=revision&revision=113693)
