- From: Florian Rivoal via GitHub <sysbot+gh@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 08 Apr 2020 05:28:41 +0000
- To: public-css-archive@w3.org
In addition to the considerations above as to whether this is even possible, another point is that while there are some use cases for physical units, and it would be nice to measure the correct amount of chemicals in your pipette using a css-made scale, these are **vastly** outnumbered by the number of developers who use units rather interchangeably without thinking too much, and don't test on a very broad range of devices. And if anyone uses the physically-accurate-on-any-device physical units for anything other than making a physically accurate measuring instrument, they'll make sites which are badly broken and unusable on a wide variety of devices. In general, the ability to use a feature wrong should not necessarily mean that we should ban that feature, but when a feature is overwhelmingly likely to be used wrong and to result in broken sites, then it's a bad feature. It be nice to be able to make accurate lab equipment in CSS, but that is of much lower importance than keeping the ability of the web to robustly work across devices, including those the author doesn't test on (which includes those that those that haven't been released yet). > The way the current "physical" units are anchored to pixels is exactly the culprit of this issue. Fixing the ratio between `px` units and physical units was found to be necessary for cross device interoperability given existing content, and desirable to make it easy to author robust cross device content. Solving cross device interoperability is a core goal of the web. Making accurate measuring equipment is not. > We are not going to write our own rendering engine to set a different anchor. You don't have to make your own rendering engine, you just need to set the default zoom level on your browser to make a 1`cm` in css be 1cm in real life, or to add a calibration step in your web app. If it works out for you, great. If not, this is unfortunate. But the whole world is not going to write a rendering engine that sacrifices cross-device interoperability just so that a few people can make rulers more easily. -- GitHub Notification of comment by frivoal Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/614#issuecomment-610759144 using your GitHub account
Received on Wednesday, 8 April 2020 05:28:45 UTC