design-reviews#1172: Other Spec Review: <meta name="text-scale" content="scale" />

#1172: Other Spec Review: <meta name="text-scale" content="scale" />

Opened

Nov 24, 2025

An introduction to the feature, aimed at unfamiliar audiences: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/blob/main/css-env-1/explainers/meta-text-scale.md#introduction
A description of the problems that end-users were facing before this proposal: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/blob/main/css-env-1/explainers/meta-text-scale.md#user-facing-problem
Alternatives considered: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/blob/main/css-env-1/explainers/meta-text-scale.md#alternatives-considered . Also, most developer use cases would be solved by using env(preferred-text-scale) in CSS calc expressions, but we heard from web developers that they "just want rem to work like they were promised" -- i.e. rem will honor the users' a11y preferences, no matter if those prefs are specified at the OS-level or UA-level. Authors don't want to mess around with env(). This <meta> proposal allows for that.
Examples of how to use the proposal to solve the end-users' problems: https://davidsgrogan.github.io/css-fonts-5/Overview.html#ex-scaled-page
What do the end-users experience with this proposal: Font sizes will honor the users' OS-level a11y preference. See https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/blob/main/css-env-1/explainers/env-preferred-text-scale.md#example-1-reddit part [4] for an illustration of the user-facing benefits
Web Platform Tests: None yet

Follows the Web Platform Design Principles.
Includes Security and Privacy Considerations sections based on answers to the Security/Privacy Questionnaire.

GitHub repo: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts
Primary contacts:
- @davidsgrogan Google, CSSWG member, Spec author, Chrome implementer
- @joshtumath BBC, CSSWG member, Spec reviewer, Explainer author, Feature champion, Dx pollster
Organization/project driving the specification: CSSWG, Google, BBC
This work is being funded by: Google and BBC
Primary standards group developing this feature: CSSWG
Incubation and standards groups that have discussed the design:
- https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/12380#issuecomment-3053293717

Multi-stakeholder feedback:
- Mozilla comments: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1326
- WebKit comments: https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/587
- {{...include feedback/review from developers, implementers, civil society, and others}} -- we've gotten informal positive feedback from web developers at a few conferences (thanks @joshtumath for polling). Other implementers: Apple and Mozilla engineers had vaguely positive comments during the CSS telecon where this was resolved to add, FWIW (minutes). (I'll file standards-positions requests ASAP, though.)
Major unresolved issues with or opposition to this specification: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/12475 -- the unresolved issue is if we should specify that UAs should scale fonts non-linearly... meaning the larger the font already is, the less of an enlargement multiplier it would get. We anticipate that shipping linear scaling will NOT prevent from future experiments with non-linear scaling. We are not aware of any opposition to the specification.
Status/issue trackers for implementations: https://chromestatus.com/feature/5112244702674944 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1976522

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