IPhone browser chooses a tiny illegible font

Question

I've been working on a number of web sites, trying to improve their "accessibility", including being readable on various smartphones. One problem that keeps coming up is that the iPhone often picks tiny fonts that nobody can read, and using the "pinch" to enlarge them causes the page to become much larger than the screen, requiring a lot of panning back and forth to read them. I've been looking for solutions, and not finding them.
In the cases I'm working on, I've removed all the tags, and the css does nothing font related except an occasional "font-size: bigger;" or "font-weight: bold". This should give the browser the freedom to pick whatever font it wants. With all other browsers, this produces readable fonts and automatic redrawing when the window is resized. But it doesn't work with the iPhone, and we get the tiny fonts instead.
I've dug around in the iPhone and various docs, and haven't found anything at all that deals with this. Is there something hidden somewhere in the iPhone Settings that would let us tell it to always use some minimal font size? If so, where is it?
(If this isn't the appropriate forum for this question, can you point me to a better one? I used this one because setting the default font sizes seems like a very basic thing that you'd want to do when you first start using a new device. Especially if you have a visual impairment. But I could be wrong.

Answer 1

Using meta name="viewport" content="width=320" did help, but seems to have some problems. One is that it only works for the "portrait" layout; when the phone is flipped to "landscape", instead of reformatting, it switches to a larger font that gives the same layout, but since the result has many fewer lines, there's a lot less information on the page.
I did a bunch of googling on the keywords, and found a lot of comments along this line, but no apparent solution. So I'll use it for now, until a better solution comes along.
The basic problem is that what it does is backwards: The server-side software is telling the browser how big (wide) its window is. This is obviously wrong in general, because the server-side code in general can't know the size of the client's window or screen. The browser is the one that knows the window dimensions, and should be sending the numbers to the server. This is something that has been a problem with the Web from the start.
A further problem with this approach is that it's guaranteed to fail some day soon. If Apple comes out with a new model with finer resolution, say 600x800 pixels, the above meta code won't work right. The history of display hardware shows such improved resolution repeatedly, and we can expect it with new iPhones in the not-too-distant future. My server-side code of course won't know about this, and will still send a meta tag saying to format for a 320-pixel-wide screen. If I happen to stumble across the new specs, I won't know which width my code should send to any particular client.
Actually, the real problem here is that the iPhone's browser appears to be violating the fundamental reason that HTML was invented. From the start, the basic idea was that text would be designed without a fixed layout, so it can be rendered on any size or shape screen. The text includes a bunch of tags hinting at layout details, such as the p and br tags to say where line wrapping should happen, the nbsp element saying where a space should appear without wrapping if possible, and so on. The browser was supposed to take this information, and with its knowledge of the available screen space, format the text so that it's legible. The iPhone's browser violates this by formatting to a window that's a larger size than the actual screen, then fitting it to the screen by shrinking the font size to illegibility.
The best solution would be some way to tell the iPhone browser to default to the original, standard browser behavior, and format the text for the available visible screen space, using the font size and colors that the user (who may have good or bad eyes) has chosen. I'm a bit surprised that nobody seems to know how to tell it to do this. Or maybe I just don't know how to google for it.
I wonder why there doesn't seem to be any way to tell the iPhone what size font to use for text? I don't know of any other browser (other than non-graphical browsers like lynx) that doesn't allow picking a font size. Even really dumb phones allow this, though the usually have only 2 to 4 font sizes. Defaulting to the very tiny font that I get for some pages seems like a bizarre, user-hostile behavior that one wouldn't expect from Apple.
But I still suspect that I'm missing something here ...