How to get iPhone Safari to format text for its screen

Question

My wife loves her iPhone, but there's one thing that's very frustrating: Safari likes to format pages so that only a small portion fits on the screen, and you have to scroll left and right to read the text. If you use a "pinch" to shrink the window, the font size also shrinks so that the text becomes unreadable.
I've tested this with a few very simple HTML pages that I've created, just text with a few andtags, and nothing with a width= or size= attribute. We still have the same problem. Safari doesn't seem to want to wrap the text at all; it either displays a page at a tiny font or in a readable font with most of the text off the screen.
I've also tested these pages with assorted other browsers, including Safari and the other dozen browsers I've installed on this Macbook Pro. All of them automatically wrap the text to fit whatever size window I use, including some very tiny windows. Also, the browser on my G1 "google" phone handles the pages just fine, using my default font and reformatting automatically when I rotate the phone to landscape format so that the text fits within the window.
The only browser I've seen this problem with is on the iPhone. found the Settings screen, looked through the Safari settings and didn't see anything relevant.
Any ideas what's wrong here? Or is the iPhone's Safari just flakey for simple text?

Answer 1

The pinching gesture is used to zoom in and out on a page. It's not resizing the window.
OK; I obviously don't know the right jargon. That's why I posted on a general discussion "support" forum rather than looking for a more technical one; I was hoping that my incorrect n00b terminology could be tolerated enough for people to try to understand the problem and point at some clues.
To try to explain it in different (and probably still not correct) terminology, Safari on the iPhone acts like it's formatting the text of even my simple HTML text pages for a large physical "page", and giving me a choice of how I want to view it. I can zoom out and see the whole piece of text, but the font is so tiny that it's unreadable (even with a magnifying glass . Or I can zoom in, in which case the screen becomes a small window that shows only a small portion of the text, and I have to pan left and right to read it, because the "page" width is now several times the screen width. Both choices make for slow, difficult reading.
I don't see this behavior in any other of the couple dozen browsers on 4 or 5 machines. What they do is respond to a change in the "window" size by reformatting the text so it fits within the window's width, scrolling off the bottom if there's too much text. This is easy to read, because vertical scrolling works well on all of them, and there's no need to pan left and right while reading a line of text.
This was pretty much how HTML and browsers were originally intended to work, with the browser doing line wrapping as needed to fit the available screen width. The screen as a window into a much larger page is seen much less often. When it is seen, it's mostly because the web designers included lots of "width=" attributes to force the page to be some minimum width, typically much wider that any smartphone's screen. But my test pages don't do this, and all other browsers successfully format them to be readable even in very narrow windows. Our iPhone's Safari doesn't seem to do this formatting; it formats the text for a width wider than the screen even when there's no formatting information in the HTML.
The obvious question is: Can the iPhone's Safari be persuaded to use more common scheme of doing line-wrapping to make the text fit into the visible screen?
The G1's browser has an especially impressive demo of how it could be done. If I rotate that gadget, it reformats between portrait and landscape mode on the fly, and the text is always line-wrapped to fit the current screen width. So a paragraph that takes, say, 7 lines in portrait mode will switch to 4 lines as I rotate it to landscape mode, with the same font size. The iPhone has the same sort of switching, of course, but it "reformats" the text by changing the zoom factor, which isn't nearly the same thing. And for some of my test pages, the text runs off the right margin in both portrait and landscape mode. I have no clue why it chooses a "page" width that's so much wider than the screen, sometimes 4 or 5 times the screen width, but that's what it does, and it's very hard to read.
So is there a way to tell it to stop doing this, and use line wrapping like other browsers do to fit the text into the visible screen width?