Re: Making pt a non-physical unit

On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 3:24 PM, Robert O'Callahan <robert@ocallahan.org>wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 12:05 AM, Robert O'Callahan <robert@ocallahan.org>wrote:
>
>> My understanding from a conversation I had on #webkit is that Webkit
>> avoids the problem by treating 1pt as 4/3px regardless of the display DPI. I
>> think we probably need to do this in Gecko for Web compatibility reasons,
>> and so for the sake of honesty in Web specifications, I propose that the
>> definition of pt in CSS be altered accordingly.
>>
>> (At this time, I don't think we need to give up on physical units
>> entirely; all the problematic sites I'm aware of are misusing pt, but not mm
>> or in. mm remains useful for specifying the dimensions of touch-based
>> interfaces.)
>>
>
> One additional question is what to do with picas. I propose keeping picas
> at 12 points, i.e., fixing them at 16 CSS pixels, i.e., making them no
> longer be a physical unit. I'm not aware of any Web content using picas at
> all, so we could leave them as physical units, but that might be
> unnecessarily confusing.
>

it's definitely worth keeping the pica/pt relationship if possible.

T