Re: Making pt a non-physical unit

On 1/6/10 3:35 PM, Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:
> Exactly. And what is being proposed here is to make this horrible,
> broken behavior the 'standard'.

Or rather, what's proposed is to make one particular means of UAs coping 
with this horrible broken behavior by web sites the standard.

> It surely is impossible if UAs decide to adopt the broken behavior as
> standard.

It's pretty much impossible no matter what, sorry.

> If UAs make an effort instead to implement things properly,
> working around broken sites with something similar to the Quirks mode
> or other workaround used to deal with messy pages, it can be fixed.

We're not talking about "messy pages".  We're talking a large fraction 
of pages out there, many of them quite new and modern.  There's no way 
to tell them apart from other pages...

> I don't expect it to be fixed overnight, obviously, but with the
> growing attention to web standards conformance and correctness,
> expect it to (slowly) gain ground, just like all other aspects of
> proper web design are.

The only way this would gain ground is if some UAs kept the current 
specced behavior (which is broken for their users in many cases) until 
enough web designers had high-DPI screens on their development machines 
(several years at least; possibly longer) _and_ used the relevant UAs on 
those machines that they'd notice things are broken.

In the meantime, users, who are by and large using higher dpi screens 
than developers because developing on mobile devices is very rare while 
usage is becoming more and more common, would run into all sorts of 
problems on a large fraction of sites.  Hence the UA mentioned above 
would be continuously losing market share, making it less likely that 
web designers would use it.

Put another way, I don't know that Gecko can keep the current behavior 
it has for the amount of time it'll take web designers to realize the 
major screwups they're perpetrating while remaining at all relevant in 
the browser space.  Doubly so for mobile devices.

I don't know that anyone is _happy_ with this situation.  But that's 
where we are right now.

-Boris

Received on Wednesday, 6 January 2010 21:26:00 UTC