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Comment by pedrokost | Hacker News Reader

The problem with image buttons like the ones shown are that they visually break when zoomed in (tested in Chrome). When I zoom in, the right side of the buttons does no longer fit perfectly with the rest of the button: it get moved by some 2 pixels up, while the rest of the button remains in place.

I've experienced this problem on many websites, that's why I try to avoid composite image buttons whenever possible. Either I create a button of only one image(which often can't be reused) or I create if with CSS3 (some compatibility issues).

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The problem with image buttons like the ones shown are that they visually break when zoomed in

Breaking features that paying users overwhelmingly do not use is not a showstopper for most businesses. I don't actively hate power-users, but if you're savvy enough to do anything other than open up the browser in the default settings and make with the clicky-clicky, you're savvy enough to undo it when you run into problems.

See also: "I disabled Javascript and your website broke", "I disable first-party cookies by default and your website broke", "I couldn't get your website to work on my wife's computer which I set up to run Lynx on Ubuntu Dapper" (no, really), etc.

I feel a lot worse over the related answer for disabled users, since they typically don't have an option to turn off being disabled, but the economics are the same: 100% higher development costs to improve the experience of under 1% of users is not feasible.

I'm one of the people perennially angry over 'I disabled JavaScript and your website broke,' but that's limited to sites that should work fine with JS off. Like this guy's - it's a blog post. A blog post should not completely break with JS off.

What I think isn't that 'the site breaks with JS off' is inherently terrible. Some sites actually do require JS - but that's far fewer than the number that think that they require JS, and completely breaking with JS off is a very distinct code smell. It says 'this person does not sweat the details.'

RE: disability, the economics are a little different, insofar as if you're a big enough target [1] it can be considered discrimination in a bunch of places.

Also, angry geeks aren't your decision-making customers/normal users, so you're not [as likely to be] foregoing revenue with them as you are with disabled users.

I don't mean this to come off as a holier-than-thou accessibility rant, but just thought the two situations were different enough to note.

1. http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1159347929235 (pun possibly intended)

That economic argument against paying to help the disabled access services is the reason why the ADA was passed.

It's a tough decision where to draw the line. A purely economic decision seems soulless; accommodation of everyone will bankrupt you.

> The problem with image buttons like the ones shown are that they visually break when zoomed in (tested in Chrome). When I zoom in, the right side of the buttons does no longer fit perfectly with the rest of the button: it get moved by some 2 pixels up, while the rest of the button remains in place.

Using Camino (FF3 or FF3.5 engine, something like that) there isn't even a need to zoom in: the alignment is broken by default[0], and when zooming in the button sometimes "tears" out[1]

[0] http://imgur.com/5yHZ5

[1] http://imgur.com/fCVhW

Is this still the case? If so I will get it fixed. I didn't do any testing yet because the blog post was not meant to go live yet.

> Is this still the case?

It is.

Oh man, Camino uses Gecko 1.9.0 which is the same version Firefox 3.0 shipped with (but the buttons work in firefox 3.0).

I traced down the bug to a conflict in my blog's css with the buttons. Somewhere they are inheriting styles that break them. The code for the buttons on github does not have this problem.

I would love to fix this, but Camino doesn't appear to have any sort of developer tool. How are you suppose to debug things?

Zooming as it is is a broken mechanic. Google Docs already attempts to detect if you are zooming in and tells you to zoom to 100% or things will be broken. I wish there was a reliable way to detect if the user is at a weird zoom level.

Not only that, but they also break when not using a mouse. Or when white backgrounds annoy you and you reverse colours. Or in any number of other cases.

Stupid idea, but sadly popular.

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