Re: Making pt a non-physical unit

On Jan 10, 2010, at 15:24 , Jonathan Kew wrote:
> As I've said before, if we're going to change the basis of "pt", we need to change ALL the current "physical" units in the same way. Anything else is a recipe for even more confusion -- besides the risk of making CSS look somewhat ridiculous.
> 


Yes, what happens if we change the spec. to say that once you have determined what a px is (using the procedure described, including rounding to whole numbers of actual pixels), then an inch is 96 of those, a point is 1/72 of one of those inches, mm conversion is the usual ratio, etc.?

If this 'works' then we are left with the question "what do I say if I *want* 2 feet on the actual display surface, not the logical viewing surface?" which gets the immediate response "and how do we define 'actual display surface' for displays that do not have one (projection glasses) or where we have no way of measuring it (we don't know that the video output device hooked to the computer is a projector, and we don't know how large the image is that it is projecting onto a screen)?"

David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Monday, 11 January 2010 19:19:33 UTC