Re: User Agents Do Not Implement Absolute Length Units, Places Responsive Design in Jeopardy

On 10/20/11 5:23 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>> This seems like it would lead to massive confusion, esp. when values are set
>> via the CSSOM or come from different stylesheets and suddenly "pt" means
>> different things in different contexts.
>
> Global scope.  Yes, it would lead to confusion if other stylesheets
> were included which assumed the normal anchoring, but them's the
> breaks.  Author your sheets consistently.

That's a tough requirement where inline style on HTML you pull in from 
elsewhere is involved....

> Apparently there are use-cases for true physical "in", given Brian's
> previous emails.  If "in" and "mm" are both useful, I would assume
> that "cm" is useful too.  And at that point it would be less confusing
> to just do all the physical units for consistency.

I would personally be fine with that.  The implementation burden is 
obviously pretty low, since converting them all to a single true unit is 
trivial.  The spec surface is a bit bigger than having a single "true" 
unit, but I think this is by far a lesser evil than magic global switches.

-Boris

Received on Thursday, 20 October 2011 21:48:23 UTC