FW: Making pt a non-physical unit

On Wednesday, January 06, 2010 3:39 PM Felix Miata wrote:
> 
> Those who need bigger than average text should be using displays big
> enough
> that their bigger text can be expected to fit, while designers should
> be, and
> can be, designing to satisfy that expectation - without any need to
> know
> specifics of any user's environment.
> 
It's not large displays that are causing this problem, it's the smaller screens with high pixel counts and higher DPI (don't we love our new laptops? ;) that make text rendered so small that it becomes almost illegible.

Vlad

> Designers should not be allowed to size for screen media globally
> without
> regard to a unit (root em) suitably chosen by the visitor. Designer
> power
> should be limited to sizing the relationships within the design
> envelope.
> Designers should not have any need to know the display size, dot pitch,
> DPI/PPI, or anything about a user's CSS or device pixels - at least not
> until
> CSS pixels become a unit whose physical size is chosen by the user, if
> that
> ever happens.
> 
> This is one major advantage, mostly in theory, as uncommon in practice,
> that
> the web has over print - user choice over appropriate overall size, aka
> resolution independence. Page zoom approximates this. Designing it in
> in the
> first place is not only possible already, but also (automatically)
> works much
> better than the user agent defense against poor (resolution dependent)
> design
> called zoom, which generally is not automatic. Deprecation of px for
> sizing
> would not be a panacea, just a nudge toward polite designer behavior
> and a
> better overall web user experience.
> --
> "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious
> people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any
> other."                      John Adams, 2nd US President
> 
>  Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409
> 
> Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/

Received on Wednesday, 6 January 2010 22:42:18 UTC