New skeletons and webhint.io (Edge) opinions differ

It seems that MS Edge (presumably Chrome too) believe (via webhint.io) that minimum-scale is an accessibility issue.

So, it wasn’t the validator that I noticed this message in, was Edge DevTools. Where it complains:

The ‘viewport’ meta element ‘content’ attribute value should not contain ‘minimum-scale’.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,minimum-scale=1,initial-scale=1">

REQUEST

https://www.a-wild-theme.wtg-demos.ca/

FURTHER READING

Obviously, this is not the skeleton theme, and has been minified, but the use of the viewport is in line with what the skeleton does.

I don’t follow this sort thing enough to know which opinion (to use minimum-scale or not use minimum-scale) is most reasonable, so I thought I’d point it out for discussion.

Not exactly convince of Edge DevTools ‘reasonableness’ for it’s advice (or webhint.io either; ahrefs uses it too, and some of the recommendations I find questionable).

Clearly maximum-scale=whatever and user-scalable=0 are not a great idea. I’m surprised that even the presence of a minimum-scale value (regardless of value) throws a warning—the browser default is 0.1.

A quick sampling…

# apple.com
width=device-width, initial-scale=1, viewport-fit=cover

# github.com
width=device-width

# go.dev
width=device-width, initial-scale=1

# gohugo.io
width=device-width,minimum-scale=1

# microsoft.com
width=device-width, initial-scale=1, shrink-to-fit=no

# twitter.com
width=device-width,initial-scale=1,maximum-scale=1,user-scalable=0,viewport-fit=cover

Given that the default value for initial-scale is 1.0, let’s follow GitHub’s lead. I’ll make the change.

1 Like

initial-scale=1

https://webhint.io/docs/user-guide/hints/hint-meta-viewport/?source=devtools

Sadly, I checked my Analytics in the last month and saw some people still stuck on Safari 7.0-9.0. I wonder which iPhone or Mac versions those are…