Re: [css3-values] Physical length units

On Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:18:21 +0100, Christoph Päper  
<christoph.paeper@crissov.de> wrote:

> The preferred unit of this camp is not ‘pt’ and ‘px’ neither. People use  
> ‘mm’ and ‘cm’ or, in the US, ‘in’. Perhaps they would like a new unit  
> ‘tip’ which is a physical centimeter or something close to it. Most of  
> them would be fine with 2) or 2*), too.


>> And they've been taught for literally decades that fonts are sized in  
>> pt. And they want to size their boxes in px.  And they _know_, again  
>> due to decades of experience, that 12pt == 16px.
>
> Yeah, those are the morons we fixed the point-pixel relation for. Now we  
> have to care about the demands of touchscreen people.

I am thinking that introducing such a 'tip' unit might be the way to go,
without defining it as a hard ratio of any existing unit, nor as a hard
coded physical distance, but something left up to the UA / user
configuration.

Just like authors should expect the 1rem to match be sized to whatever the
default font size should be for that particular user in that particular
environment for things to be readable, they could expect 1tip to be sized
just right for things to be touchable.

  - Florian

Received on Tuesday, 21 February 2012 14:29:37 UTC