Re: Defining safe areas for media devices and set top boxes

> OK, but I seem to be hearing two different things. On the one hand, people seems to react against me saying that tube (CRT) technology was a dying technology for TVs, as though it was inflammatory for me to say so, and not merely a straightforward statement of uncontested fact (I no longer see them being sold at stores, at least in the US). On the other hand, you said that "low-res TV is completely out of scope". And back on the first hand again, you are now saying that low-res TV is relevant, because people will still have older SD TVs for years.
> 

I mistyped and you misinterpreted. I replied:

# Whether regular web page are visible on a low-res TV is completely out of scope of my initial subject.

when I meant

# Whether regular web pages are visible or not on a low-res TV is completely out of scope of my initial subject.

Meaning, the quality of the TV doesn't matter because the browser is running on a device which doesn't know much about the screen.

> I am just trying to determine how long-lasting and relevant the problem is. IF (and I do say "if") it is relevant only to:
> 
>    a) CRT TVs that are no longer being sold which don't display Web pages well anyway for a variety of reasons, and 
> 
>   b) naive installation of inappropriate cabling (a problem I would expect to diminish as HDTVs with Web connections become more the norm and therefore grow in importance to the Web), 
> 

The cable part was just an example of how the perfect hardware configuration can be introduced a problem. It would be quite stupid of me to justify the unfe-area media query solely based on connecting with a RCA cable to a hi-res TV, which is clearly not what I said. But RCA cables, or other types, are indeed used, to connect to TVs which don't have HDMI ports.

> ...then I would not expect the problem to be relevant enough to content authors to actually get many of them to write special styling rules inside a media query. It seems to me that it is the great increase in pixel area that makes HDTVs a much more practical venue for regular Web pages than SD TVs ever were in the era of WebTV, etc. Without the HD, I wouldn't expect much more authoring for the Web on TVs than we've had already.
> 

I repeat my myself, the user agent is running on a media device which doesn't know anything about the screen.

Received on Tuesday, 7 December 2010 17:13:20 UTC