Maemo is not a tiny traditional mobile display, 800px width is about as much as most websites have been optimized for until not so long ago (and which is still generally considered).

What you have to take into consideration is, that it doesn't matter so much how wide the website is. What you are interested in is to comfortably fit the text column you are reading, and a website that forces text columns to be considerably wider than 800px has bigger problems than not displaying well on mobile devices.

Once the text column fits on the screen with proper text wrapping, it is only a matter of setting a font size you are comfortable reading at. Quim already indicated that this will be possible, so you shouldn't have an issue with the new browser. At least the sites that have been mentioned in this thread so far seem to reflow flawlessly. It may be inconvenient at times if some websites force a ridiculously small font size, but that is no different than on the desktop really. And in that case it is a valid question why you are using a mobile-optimized website that was obviously designed for devices at much lower DPI, with no consideration to scalability (e.g. that mobile ESPN page). As for the mobile nytimes page, this seems to be perfectly scalable and respect the user's font choices, so as long as you set the font size to something you are comfortable reading at, I don't see what could possibly be the problem.

In any case, breaking the layout of a website to make it fit on the screen in its entirety is not the right approach IMO. Unlike most (or probably all) mobile phone browsers, the Maemo browser is not that far from a desktop browser that we would need to resort to ugly hacks to make things usable.

Please keep this thread on-topic with "Fit Width to View related posts. Thanks!

It is known that Maemo's primary goal is to fit in your pocket. It is also known that the Maemo 5 SDK is set to a 800x480 screen resolution.

If we go back to the issue in question:

1) As far as I know Opera first came up with the original fit-width-to-view concept.

2) As a vendor focusing mainly on the mobile market (as that's where they got paid), I imagine the main reason behind the design was to make it easier to wiew web pages originally made for much wider displays than any mobile devices at that time. As an alternative to the WAP sites, which never really took off. Opera and fwtv made it possible to watch "normal" sites.

3) With our Nokia tablets we have a much wider display (both in pixels and size) than typical mobile devices, so even though the web page width issue is still there to some extent it isn't that bad (although there are setbacks - the old BBC news page fit our tables perfectly, the new one doesn't).

4) Instead, width our wide screens we can use the fwtv function for something more, because the tablets have convenient hardware zoom buttons: Make fonts large enough to be readable (for those of us who can't focus very close), by combining FWTV with zoom.

With our screens 4 is probably more important than 3, and I'm not sure if 4 is even possible or feasible with narrow-screen mobile devices. If we just look at 4 (make the fonts readable), the ultimate way of doing that is simply to increase fonts and let the "standard" browser functions reformat the text flow (and obviously BrentDC's concerns about .txt not wrapping correctly comes into play here). That should work better for the purpose of making fonts readble (for more sites) than FWTV.

To conclude: For me I would be quite satisfied if I could get a tablet browser which lets me "zoom" font sizes (and just font sizes) as easily as I can today zoom them by first switching to fwtv and then press zoom. For the problem of 4) this would probably be even better than fwtv.

On my desktop browser I "zoom" the fonts by pressing "ctrl" and "+" a number of times. That would not be satisfactory on a tablet, it's too cumbersome. Heck, it's too cumbersome on the desktop even. So, give me the above and I'll be happy to let today's fwtv go. The loss of 3) I can handle, even though there are a few sites that work beautifully width it (that is, not just for fonts). 4) is much more important though.

Here's an example of a page that's currently unusable without Fit Width To View. It would be interesting to see how the Fremantle browser handles it:

https://www.google.com/adsense/suppo...er=17957&hl=en

Several web sites (for instance www.repubblica.it) offer on-page letter magnifying functions (A+ or A-). I use those to avoid FWTV, although it is a little annoying clicking several times on these tiny links.

Having the browser pre-determine what size is best for the reader as suggested above would be great. If this is not possible I would rather keep the function and improve it. Would the following features difficult to implement in the new browser?

- warning message (that can be switched off)

- make the FWTV function work only in the browser window in which the user has specified that he wants it switched on.

- switch off FWTV when the browser is closed.

I would not bury the function deep in some menus. A newbie could switch it on (just playing with the new tool) and forget altogether what (and where) is was.

Regards,
Antonio

@eiffel:
Interesting. That page doesn't even work with firefox + font size increase (ctrl-+) on the desktop. That's maybe because of the table.

Good example -- tear can't handle it either. But FWTV can.

Yup...

The same with IE7.

Zooming out getms almost all the page without horizontal scroll. You see the full body text plus one full column plus half the other. But then font size is very small. Increasing font size to largest makes it readable.

Given that for many pages there is no way to have page fit the tablet screen with a reasonable font size, without the "Fit to page" feature, and that many tablet users do want this feature, in one shape or the other, have you considered implementing a similar feature from scratch and adding it to the new (Fremantle) browser? To avoid breaking page layouts, it may be useful to rename it to "Try fitting to width", and bail out on HTML elements that cannot be resized.