Re: [css3-mediaqueries] tv and screen media types

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 3:30 AM, David Storey <dstorey@opera.com> wrote:
> On 29 Oct 2010, at 09:45, Rune Lillesveen wrote:
>> On Fri, 29 Oct 2010 09:14:31 +0200, fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote:
>>> On 10/28/2010 05:41 AM, Rune Lillesveen wrote:
>>>> On Thu, 28 Oct 2010 14:20:18 +0200, David Storey <dstorey@opera.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> The Nintendo Wii browser uses the TV media type if it is there
>>>>> otherwise uses the Screen media type. It works better than handheld as
>>>>> there is no, or less legacy content out there using TV which would
>>>>> break modern browsers.
>>>>>
>>>>> I believe the TV media type is quite useful as modern TVs have pretty
>>>>> big resolution now (so you can;t do the trick like with mobile for
>>>>> applying style when the resolution is lower), but you want a somewhat
>>>>> different experience on TV. You generally sit close to a desktop or
>>>>> laptop so can have regular size text, while on TV you are usually
>>>>> sitting back on the couch, so want to pump up the text size for
>>>>> example. Using a TV media type makes it much easier to detect the user
>>>>> is on a TV, providing browser vendors support it. TVs also come in a
>>>>> standard set of resolutions (1080p/i 720, SD etc) so the TV media type
>>>>> in combination with media queries for those resolutions can be quite
>>>>> powerful if supported.
>>>>
>>>> Pumping up the pixel size of a font based on physical DPI is only needed
>>>> for broken UAs, right? See [1]
>>>>
>>>> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#pixel-units
>>>
>>> Note that definition of the pixel has been superseded.
>>> http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/specs/css2.1/px-unit
>>> http://csswg.inkedblade.net/spec/css2.1#issue-149
>>
>> Yes, and with that definition, for tv, the physical units would be anchored to the reference pixel, making it even less interesting to change font-sizes based on the resolution media feature.
>
> Yes, as far as I see it, browsing on TV is a different context. It is less about DPI and resolution, and more about the context you are viewing web pages. Usually in a more social setting. PC and mobile is more one to one where you are close to the screen, while with TV you are about 10 feet away, and often (but not always) i a more social setting where multiple people can see the content. For this you don’t care about the DPI, but more that the user is viewing on a TV (TV media type) and you want to adjust the layout; The most simple being the text size so it is physically big enough to read across the room instead of readable at a few cm from the screen.

While it's nice to talk about things you can do specially with a tv
media type to target, that doesn't change the fact that the Google TV
team feels that making it match 'tv' would break too much of the web,
as 'screen' has been overused to mean 'not print'.  (Pretty sure
*I've* written pages that do that.)

So, my initial request (to make 'screen' match at the same time as
'tv', 'handheld', and 'projection') still stands.  That allows you to
style specially for tv viewing, without breaking webpages that are
only accidentally specialized for a computer monitor.

~TJ

Received on Friday, 29 October 2010 12:50:30 UTC