Re: Making pt a non-physical unit

On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 6:51 AM, Simetrical <simetrical@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 9, 2010 at 10:33 PM, Ambrose LI <ambrose.li@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have this crazy idea that this is still an "education" problem.
>
> I don't think you're ever going to educate all web authors that "12pt"
> is unsuitable for the web when it works just fine in Word.  I strongly
> suspect that most people who use point sizes don't even know that a
> point is 1/72 of an inch, and have just developed an intuitive
> understanding of what various point sizes mean based on their
> experience with word processors.  The problem from this perspective is
> that most people probably think of "pt" in relative terms, not as a
> physical unit.  (The other problem is that physical units are of
> limited utility in web pages.)

That was precisely my experience, for example - I just through of pt
as "the weird unit that Word uses for font sizes".  I used it once or
twice before discarding it as too annoying.  I definitely thought of
it in the same terms as px, though.

~TJ

Received on Sunday, 10 January 2010 14:29:57 UTC