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

hi,

this is a very interesting, although seemingly hopeless conversation about this rather confusing topic (at least it is/was for me). i too came here originally because of the hit target problem, but generally i would like to expect "physical units" to work as expected/promised and as suggested by their name.

in my opinion and experience, it is extremely misleading and irritating to borrow the names of "real" units like inch or cm and use them for "fake" units that lead to different/unexpected results. i really cannot think of why they were introduced in the first place, if there was never a chance to achieve exact/expected results with them. i can only guess it has some historic reasons ("simpler times") and it can not be undone now without breaking some exotic code (which is i would do in a second).

it probably would help others like me a lot to prominently warn of that mix-up, to expect inaccurate results and probably 99% of the time avoid these units at all. in the specs there is a note, but is very subtle. it should be a big red warning sign.

i too would really like to use the real deal or avoid it at all, but that has already been discussed in great lengths. the suggested alternative/compromise of being able to at least set a unit-scale-adjust property on specific elements or even the html element sounds great too! it reminds me of applications like acrobat that supports setting a global custom dpi to manually adjust/calibrate the display of documents. of course, it would even be better to automatically support reliable actual 1:1 physical view/scale like indesign or illustrator. if that is not possible (for whatever reason), why not give up these otherwise unnecessary units at all.

it is funny the same discussions happened when some desktop publishing software introduced the pixel unit to attract web designers and suggested it is a real physical unit while such software works independent of density/resolution until export... it seems like the same issue just the other way around.

anyway, the concept of css pixel as an angle is really great!

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Received on Friday, 9 April 2021 16:01:42 UTC