Re: Making pt a non-physical unit

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 1:34 PM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu> wrote:
> On 1/7/10 1:17 PM, Brad Kemper wrote:
>> and people will ask why our content looks so much worse than our
>> competitors.
>
> Do people ever actually do that?  Given what the top100 sites look like, I
> find that very hard to believe....

Yes, but *very* few of them.  On Wikipedia we get maybe a few dozen
such questions a week, that I know of, surely less than a hundred, and
that's with several *billion* hits a day (source:
<http://www.nedworks.org/~mark/reqstats//reqstats-daily.png>).  Unless
I'm missing the places people ask the questions, I guess -- I know
there are only a few new topics per day created on pages like
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)>.  Of
course, hopefully Wikipedia doesn't use as many terrible hacks as most
large websites, and it certainly doesn't change around its layout so
often as a lot of them do.


Anyway, it seems clear to me that there's no sense in having physical
units when you have not the slightest idea what the viewing distance
will be.  For printing and similar things, physical units should stay
physical, but for display anywhere else, I'd match everything up to
the current definition of pixels.  I skimmed through the whole
discussion so far, and haven't seen anyone say why they'd actually
want to use physical units for anything, on a monitor.  A diagram
labeled "actual size"?

Received on Thursday, 7 January 2010 19:43:10 UTC