Re: User Agents Do Not Implement Absolute Length Units, Places Responsive Design in Jeopardy

I think physical size addresses this - one use case for that line of
thought:

When the screen is 50ft+ wide (jumbotron), text that would normally comprise
8% of the screen height (living room TV or 15" laptop) would now comprise
40% of the screen height to maintain legibility throughout the expected
setting (stadium).

How would this situation be better-handled by angular size? For that matter,
how would a UA and the hardware it runs on gather angular size data to be
transponded to the author?

Cheers,
-Brian


On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 2:57 PM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu> wrote:

> On 10/5/11 2:55 PM, Brian Blakely wrote:
>
>> In order to deliver appropriate layouts to, for example, a mobile media
>> player, web-enabled TV, and a stadium jumbotron with a single codebase,
>> and ideally an identical HTML codebase.
>>
>
> Yes, yes.  That doesn't answer my question.  Why is linear size the
> important metric there and not angular size?
>
> For the specific examples of TV and jumbotron, angular size seems like a
> much more desirable measure than physical size.  A viewer doesn't care that
> the jumbotron is 100x bigger if it's also 100x further away.
>
> -Boris
>