Re: Pixel, Points and Spatial Measures

On 13/01/2017 18:26, Alastair Campbell wrote:
>> Maybe we only need to drop "point"as a term
>
> Big +1, in all future work we should use the unit of the medium.

Yes. There's a reason why guidelines for design/development by 
Microsoft, Apple, Google (particularly in the mobile space) use 
density-independent logical units of measure (dppx - density independent 
pixels; ep - effective pixels; and Apple's own custom use of "points" 
which have nothing to do with real-world spatial points nor with CSS 
points, but are their own custom way of saying "density-independent 
pixel") - see 
https://github.com/w3c/Mobile-A11y-Extension/blob/gh-pages/SCs/m2.md#evidence

And it's exactly because they also realise that it's pointless (pardon 
the pun) to try and define sizes in real-world physical measurements 
when designing things that will be displayed on a variety of screen sizes.

>> and let market pressure solve the base font issue for us. Over the
> last 400 years publishers that used font below the critical print size
> for fully sighted readers went broke.

I wouldn't capitulate altogether. I'd still define a minimum font size, 
but define it in CSS pixels, and mandate that as the lower bound 
(possibly with exceptions, when it's ancilliary information - so maybe 
define it as the main content text of a page that needs to be at least X 
pixels in size?).

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke

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Received on Friday, 13 January 2017 18:34:36 UTC