html - iPad layout scales up when rotating from portrait to landscape

Question

I have a added to the "viewport" meta tag "width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0" and on an iPad the page loads up fine in landscape mode, the it switches nicely to portrait and when I rotate it back to landscape it scales the page up and I have to pinch zoom it back to a 1 scale.

I can fix this by adding the "maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=no", but I was wondering if there is a way I could fix this without taking away from the user the ability to zoom in the page.

If you have any suggestions I would love to hear them,
Thanks!

Answer 1

------ Update ------

This is not an issue anymore in iOS7. And there is better fix by Scott Jehl on github scottjehl/iOS-Orientationchange-Fix that works for iOS6.

------ Original answer ------

Jeremy Keith (@adactio) has a good solution for this on his blog Orientation and scale

Keep the Markup scalable

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

Then disable scalability with javascript until gesturestart with this script:

if (navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i) || navigator.userAgent.match(/iPad/i)) {
    var viewportmeta = document.querySelector('meta[name="viewport"]');
    if (viewportmeta) {
        viewportmeta.content = 'width=device-width, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, initial-scale=1.0';
        document.body.addEventListener('gesturestart', function () {
            viewportmeta.content = 'width=device-width, minimum-scale=0.25, maximum-scale=1.6';
        }, false);
    }
}