Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-values] Ability to address actual physical size (#614)

I think it is actually the only proper way to design layouts - using physical units (also see this [blog post](https://smus.com/physical-units/)). What we currently have is a total mess - websites display differently on screens with different densities and sizes and it doesn't make sense at all. Sometimes header fonts are so big that they fill more than half of device screen height on smartphones! Hard-coded density of 96dpi is ridiculous, having now smartphones with 760 ppi on the market. Then some people do `@2x` and `@3x` srcset image versions as cheap workarounds.

I think website layouts should be designed for various physical sizes (not pixels, not relative vw or 96pixel inches). For example: small smartphones (<5"), medium (7" small tablet), large (10" tablet), desktop (20"), x-large (40" large monitor, TV etc).

Then browser would choose the one fitting fully into the physical display size, leaving space around or stretching layout to fit. Image assets should be selected so that they match or exceed pixel density of the display. Nowadays I often see that if the magic "retina" scaling factor is not integer (1.5, 1.6), the browser picks the lower-resolution images (e.g. 1.0x "non-retina" scale) and just make them blurry by stretching them. It doesn't make sense.

Additionally, there should be one more "variable" and that is user scale. If someone wanted to display a website on a big 8000 inch movie canvas located 100 yards from the viewer, user could apply 200x "scale" which would simply act as a magnifying glass in the real world. This is all what that magical OS-level or browser-level "scaling" should do. 

Display technologies are so great nowadays, yet websites sometimes look awful due to lack of physical units and bad management of raster images, which is sad. :(

Someone has to start that. After there is a spec for physical units, browsers will demand DPI info from the OS, vendors sill start putting proper EDID records to monitors, etc.

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Received on Thursday, 7 November 2019 20:05:15 UTC