Re: Behavior of device-pixel-ratio under zoom

On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 9:14 AM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu> wrote:

> On 11/13/12 6:02 PM, James Robinson wrote:
>
>> Neither change
>> window.devicePixelRatio - that's an artifact of the display and cannot
>> be changed by user interaction.
>>
>
> How is it an artifact of the display?  It's a ratio of CSS pixels to
> device pixels; the display knows nothing about CSS pixels, and in fact
> "page zoom" in your terminology changes this ratio!
>

Minor nitpick: it's the ratio of density-independent pixels (aka
device-independent/logical/UI pixels) to device pixels (aka physical screen
pixels). On mobile, if you have a width=device-width viewport, then DIPs
are initially equivalent to CSS pixels, but when the user pinch-zooms, the
size of CSS pixels changes, whereas the size of DIPs does not change, hence
the devicePixelRatio does not change either when you pinch zoom.

James is thinking of devicePixelRatio as an artifact of the display because
mobile OSes generally provide a fixed default ratio between DIPs and device
pixels (e.g. Android's
DisplayMetrics.density<http://developer.android.com/reference/android/util/DisplayMetrics.html#density>).
But if the browser changes the size of a DIP, e.g. because the user pressed
Ctrl-+ on desktop, then we need to update the devicePixelRatio accordingly.

So I agree with the consensus: devicePixelRatio should change when you
Ctrl-+ on desktop, but not when you pinch zoom on mobile.

On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 9:19 AM, Rune Lillesveen <rune@opera.com> wrote:

> device-pixel-ratio should not change for the magnifying glass type of zoom
> you have in mobile browser, but it should change for the type of zoom you
> have in the Opera Desktop browser, and IIRC the resolution preference you
> have in the Android browser, which both affect the ICB.
>

I'm not exactly sure what resolution preference in the Android browser
you're talking about. But in Chrome for Android we're considering linking
accessibility scaling preferences to the devicePixelRatio, in similar
fashion to the above. So if you have a 2x accessibility scale, then
devicePixelRatio would be double the device's normal value, DIPs would be
twice as large, and "device-width" would halve such that responsive designs
would display their phone layout on tablets.