[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 8186] New: Yahoo finance stock portfolios unusable when min font size > 10

[bugzilla-daemon at opendarwin.org]

http://bugzilla.opendarwin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8186

           Summary: Yahoo finance stock portfolios unusable when min font
                    size > 10
           Product: WebKit
           Version: 417.x
          Platform: Macintosh
               URL: http://finance.yahoo.com/
        OS/Version: Mac OS X 10.4
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: Layout and Rendering
        AssignedTo: webkit-unassigned at opendarwin.org
        ReportedBy: trey at usa.net


Go to finance.yahoo.com.  Bring up Safari's prefs, Advanced tab.  Set the min
font size to 11.  This should cause the list of tabs at near the top of the
page to wrap around, so that the "Portfolios" tab is now at the left edge.

While this may be a bit visually broken, it's way worse functionally if you
actually have an account and some saved portfolios.  In that case the menu that
drops from the tab comes up so far left it is mostly beyond the edge of the
window, and the titles of the menu's items are not visible.  So functionally,
it becomes very difficult to access one's portfolios.

A related example is the layout breakage at nytimes.com caused by the same
prefs setting (bug 8148).

One could say, "well if it breaks the site, then don't set your font that way",
but the problem is that the user may have made that font choice long ago and
forgotten it.  In fact this is what happened to me, where I noticed these two
sites broken and had no idea what might have caused it.  bdash also had the
same experience.

One could also say "well the sites are broken, their code isn't general enough
to allow for different layout results", but practically speaking I doubt many
web designers think in such general terms, nor understand CSS positioning all
that well to begin with.  More likely they are proceeding by trial and error to
find something that works in the major browsers, unaware of how brittle or
"correct" the resulting solution is.

I can appreciate that at a basic level Safari is behaving as expected in these
cases, so one could say there is no bug.  I'm writing this up mostly to draw
some attention to the downsides of the feature, and solicit any ideas for
making it safer, or for giving the user a clue as to how to respond to these
cases.


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