Web page for IPhone - Large fonts instead of scrolling?
- by chris_l
I'm planning the layout of my web page, which should also be usable on the IPhone. I don't really have much experience with the IPhone yet - I just installed the IPhone Simulator on my Mac.
The page's contents are flexible, so I think it would be better to use this flexibility to avoid that the user has to scroll around the entire page. Especially I have
A header and a sidebar that will be used all the time to perform several actions.
A main content area with a number of elements (e.g. images). The UI would stay usable pretty well, if the number of elements shown at one time is reduced for a small screen (e.g. by JavaScript). It would also be okay to make the main content area scrollable (as opposed to the entire page).
The problem: If I simply display the page on the IPhone, it uses an extremely small font size, so that users must zoom in first, and then scroll around - so that they can't see the header and sidebar all the time.
What's the best way to deal with this situation?
Just leave it this way (very small fonts), because users expect that behaviour on the IPhone?
Increase the font size (by specifying it in em or px or with xx-large, or what would be the best way?), if I detect - somehow - that it's being displayed on the IPhone.
Or is there some way to restrict the viewport size to the screen size, and make it zoom in automatically? I think that would be the easiest solution in my case.
Or ...?