- From: L. David Baron via GitHub <sysbot+gh@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2024 18:17:29 +0000
- To: public-css-archive@w3.org
A note about how we got to the world we're in today: In the early days of browsers, many browsers did honor user settings much more than they did today. The default font size was not always `16px`, and the ratio of physical units (`pt`/`cm`/`in`/etc.) to `px` units varied depending on the user's display resolution. Some browsers supported more variation here than others. The end result of this was that users made changes to their browsers or OS settings that broke many web pages. This isn't suprising. Testing web pages across a complex testing matrix where the relationships between sizes specified in different units can vary is hard, and web developers often got things wrong or weren't even aware of all the things that could vary. So browsers stopped allowing these things to vary: the default font size and `medium` were fixed at `16px`, and a CSS pixel was fixed at 1/96 of a CSS inch. Browsers then added support for mechanisms (like today's zoom) that zoomed everything at once, and as far as the page could tell, were equivalent to the viewport growing or shrinking. Has the use of more flexible layout systems improved how web pages will support this amount of variation? Probably a bit... but enough? Browsers do need to serve their end users (see the [priority of constituencies](https://www.w3.org/TR/design-principles/#priority-of-constituencies)), and in the end it doesn't serve end users well to provide user options that make unusable a bunch of the stuff on the web that those users want to see. Trying again by providing some ways for developers to opt in to using the user's preferred font size seems like a plausible step to take. We should do that while being aware that we might, later, need to take that power away, and browsers might again need to start reporting a single value in order to prevent web pages from being broken for their users. That said, another possible path here is that browsers could interpret some of these user preferences as implying different defaults for the zooming mechanisms that scale *everything*, and thus essentially adjust web pages on the one set of inputs (viewport size) that we are currently able to assume (to some degree) that they can adjust across. -- GitHub Notification of comment by dbaron Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/10674#issuecomment-2402983143 using your GitHub account -- Sent via github-notify-ml as configured in https://github.com/w3c/github-notify-ml-config
Received on Wednesday, 9 October 2024 18:17:30 UTC