08.18.2004 - Zoom Page Favelet
Last week a co-worker brought up MSIE's inablity to resize pixel sized fonts on a message board we run to discuss web development and standards stuff and thought it would be a good idea to develop a javascript library to add the functionality to our pages for folks in IE. An excellent idea, so I decided to tackle it in my ever decreasing amount of free time - it also occured to me that it would make a nice favelet.
What I wrote was a script that would parse through all of the style sheet objects referenced by a document as well as the inline style attributes, checking for defined fontSize rules and incrementing them by 1. It worked marvelously on the test page I wrote for it that had a smattering of elements with various font sizes and units, but when employed on a page with a large-ish style sheet it failed miserably. Seconds would pass while IE went about bumping all the font sizes.
It then occured to me that MSIE has a proprietary style called zoom that allows you to, well...zoom everything. I'd never found a real use for it outside of the end animation in Perfection.
A quick search for MSIE and zoom led me to Gez Lemon's Juicy Studio, who had written a favelet using IE's zoom a few weeks ago. We had a brief conversation in his comments on it -- I suggested an improvement or two for it, he agreed they were good ideas, but said he doesn't intend to develop it any further. So, I'll post mine.
Invoke the favelet and then use the plus and minus keys on your numeric keypad to increment and decrement the zoom factor. Use the asterix on your numeric keypad to reset the zoom factor to 1x.
I've noticed an oddity or two with some pages - on this site, it doesnt zoom the navigation menu, and I've no clue why. It does work on most sites though, so hopefully you'll get some use from it.
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