- From: Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>
- Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2010 10:27:25 -0700
- To: Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org>
- Cc: "Dr. Olaf Hoffmann" <Dr.O.Hoffmann@gmx.de>, public-fx@w3.org, www-style@w3.org
On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 9:56 AM, Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org> wrote: > Hi, Folks- > > I was under the impression that it was not possible to render real-world > units to uncalibrated monitors, and that most monitors are uncalibrated; am > I mistaken or confused (maybe thinking of color calibration), or has that > changed? That is also true, more or less. I'm not an expert at the arcane details of the information exposed by various system APIs, but yeah, I believe that at least a significant amount of the time you can't get "true" information about the physical dimensions of the monitor, so rendering a "true inch" is logically impossible for *any* program that doesn't self-calibrate with a "hold a ruler up to the screen"-type message. > Wouldn't it be possible to meet both use-cases by adding a property, > something like 'unit-space':'realteive*|absolute', where the default is to > use these abstracted units (for necessary bugwards compatibility), and the > 'absolute' option would do its best to render the physical size as > indicated? This would be something like dealing with transforms or > viewboxes. That's been proposed, as has a parallel set of "true" physical units that aren't tied to the definition of a pixel. The basic issue is simply a question of how much anyone *cares*. There doesn't seem to be much evidence that the current state of affairs is bad enough to fix. After all, the "bugwards compatibility" that we're adding is simply a reflection of what every browser has done for years; it's correcting the spec to match reality, not coming up with something new. If it was really a problem, we'd see authors complaining about it. So, since this is an issue that (a) only affects a limited class of devices right now, and will disappear *completely* in the relatively near future, and (b) authors don't seem to care about in the first place, it doesn't seem like it's worthwhile to care about it. As far as I've been able to tell, the only concern that anyone has expressed over it has been aesthetic, not practical. ~TJ
Received on Saturday, 14 August 2010 17:28:21 UTC