IE 6 zoom property and SELECT elements

[Francis Parsons]

Hi! I'm doubtful there's a workaround for this problem, but it's
worth a shot. I'm using IE's (css) "zoom" property to zoom the body
of a document (in conjunction with persistance so the previously
selected percentage level is restored each time the page is reloaded).
I don't expect zoomed images to look perfect, but overall the quality
of the zooming is pretty good (as good as Opera's ;-) EXCEPT for any
<select> elements, which are messed up.

Zooming a dropdown select element to less than 100% doesn't harm it
much, but at just over 100% the height of the dropdown list "shrinks"
to make the items inside unreadable. In fact, apart from this, IE
seems not to do anything with select elements in a "zoomed" body - the
height and width of the select element doesn't change, nor does the
size of the text of options inside it. I attempted a script to "fix"
any <select> elements in the page by:

-- explicitly zooming the select element itself: this does make the
height and width of the element change but nothing else
-- looping through all options inside the <select> to set the zoom:
still not usable. Although this doesn't affect the size of the text
for individual options, the options at least become readable, even
though the list height is still too small (you can scroll them).

It doesn't matter if the select is a dropdown (size=1) or a listbox -
IE doesn't zoom them with the rest of the page. As far as using style
properties on the individual option elements, there seems to be a
limited number of properties that actually work: font color,
background color, italic.

Has anyone here ever found a workaround that would make a <select>
element readable for zoom percentages over 100%? Is this a
"documented " limitation of using the zoom property? Does anyone know
what is "special" about select boxes that would account for this
limitation? (I remember that with visual basic controls, comboboxes
and listboxes are technically separate "window" having they're own
handle)

I'm not keen on having to choose between including a "page zoom" and
using <select> elements. I've tried pop-ups for lists, and I can zoom
these, but this is more work than it's worth in many instances.

Any kind of information is appreciated, as I could not find mention of
this anywhere searching Google Groups.

--- Francis