Re: Comments on media queries

On Nov 16, 2007, at 00:48, David Woolley wrote:

> One problem I occasionally get is designers who think it is cool to  
> have a background texture that has alternating scan lines light and  
> dark. That gives a big flicker problem.  Accepting that that sort of  
> designer probably wouldn't bother to do a media query for interlace,  
> how would you make a user agent that handled that situation without  
> causing problems where there was a legitimate need to have  
> alternating brightness between scan lines, and why would a user  
> agent implementor think it worth implementing such an algorithm?


Considering that TVs are generally viewed from a distance, I was  
thinking of 1px equaling two scan lines. But then, that probably isn't  
good as it would leave the overall screen px dimensions too small for  
the usual Web designs.

In any case, authoring for interlaced displays assumes that you know  
the height of a scan line in CSS units. Media queries don't tell you  
how many scan lines a px equals, for example.

For desktop cases, I would expect browsers to implement neither  
countermeasure algorithms nor scan mode queries, since it is so rare  
these days for a desktop to have a screen that is both interlaced and  
has such a low refresh rate that it makes small details flicker.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Friday, 16 November 2007 08:16:38 UTC