I am well on the way to developing new designs for our site. However, in having the design tested for accessibility, I have run into some problems with the way Opera handles zooming.
My design has three columns: from left-to-right there are (1) a fixed width column with a bit of contextual info about the Department, (2) main content area outlining the major work of the organisation and navigation into those areas and (3) a relatively sized column with news, features, etc. Column 1 is fixed, mainly because it is of less importantance in terms of overall site awareness and use and has less content. Column 3 is relatively sized, which means that Column 2 handles whatever space is left over. As I increase text sizes in IE and Mozilla, Column 1 remains the same width, meaning the text and space in the other two columns remains readable up to the largest text size in IE and at least 300% in Mozilla. Using the zoom function in Opera, however, even Column 1 continues to scale up in width (ie. beyond the fixed size specified). As a result, Column 2 which has the really important content starts to get squashed. At 200% zoom, some characters in Column 2 start to leak out into Column 3, and after that Column 2 is reduced to about one word in width. So, what is the best way of creating a liquid layout that supports Opera's zooming functionality. I am of course reluctant to blame the browser... Any thoughts would be appreciated, AS ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ Proud presenters of Web Essentials 04 http://we04.com/ Web standards, accessibility, inspiration, knowledge To be held in Sydney, September 30 and October 1, 2004 See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
