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Next in Browser Development, High DPI Websites?
Joost de Valk writes "In a post at the WebKit blog, Dave Hyatt raises interesting points about the future of web development and browsers. He says, that with screens getting more and more pixels, it is imperative website design takes the next step: High DPI Website rendering. This could mean that a CSS pixel (px) is rendered as a 2x2 pixelblock. In the article he also mentions WebKit will be providing possibilities to use SVG for all kinds of purposes, like backgrounds. He calls upon other browser developers to take part in the discussion so that 'concrete standards in this area can be hammered out.'"
...tell me they aren't going to do this.
I run at a high resolution so I can fit more on the screen, not make it more detailed.
1600x1200 is not a high-def 800x600!
Geez...
The headline says "high DPI"... if each pixel was rendered as a 2x2 block, wouldn't that make it a lower DPI? Correct me if I'm wrong...
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
how about they hammer out existing css standards and compatability between browsers before they start trying to create new standards.
This is going to be a nightmare for web developers like me. Not only will I have to test my website in Internet Explorer 5, 6, 7, Opera 6, 7, 8, Firefox 1, 1.5, 2, Konquerer/Safari, Netscape, etc... but also test in the SAME browsers on monitors with a high resolution to make sure the High DPI rendering doesn't mess up navigation.
This is just a bad idea. Not only is this not going through the W3C as it should to be standardized, but many sites do pixel positioning to have ultimate control over their design. This could throw that out of wack (it looks like this only affects CSS and not pictures/spacers some developers use). Also, I can guarentee you if this is standardized, it'll be like Microsoft's Alpha-Transparent PNG support... it'll come... eventually...
I think maybe we should wait until the current standards are, erm, standard.
Even today I have to tweak valid code to make all the browsers see it the same.
Get the basics right first, like float, tranparency, opacity etc then add to it with whatever is needed.
Common sense is not so common
I'm still running in 320x200, you insensitive clod!
The web will render text just fine for people who set their screen's dpi correctly. Gone are the days of 72px (96 for Macs) == 1 physical inch on a screen. It's just the images and backgrounds (or anything else with fixed dimensions) that won't scale with the text.
While I agree to a point (being able to cram SVG into everywhere it could possibly work will be awesome), any hi-def web design will take a back seat while the next generation standard is decided upon... I vote XHTML2 over HTML5.
There should be more focus on developing websites to be compatible with smaller screens than desktop monitors. How many times have people tried to view some useful website on their PDA or cellphone or other small screened device, only to have it practically unusable due to formatting issues with such a small screen real estate. There is a far higher need for small screen compatability than large screens due to the fact that a bigger screen does not screw up formatting, and therefore is not an issue for the user.
Opera has a zoom function that scales the entire page already. Images smooth as they are enlarged and do not look pixelated while text takes on a larger font size without losing detail. Basically it works just like this guy describes and it already exists!
I don't see what's the big deal about standardizing this.
I'd just like my browser when I press Ctrl-Plus to not just resize the fonts but also pictures, lines and all the other stuff. Just like the other 1000 scalable UI systems that we deal with every day, from Flash to Aqua or every PC game out there.
Every other day I come across a website that has some pixel-nazi design, that just isn't readable for people with high DPI displays, minor vision impairment, or just people who don't want to lean forward all the time to read 8 pixel fonts.
I have no idea why Firefox doesn't have this simple scaling yet (or does it somehow?).
I just HATE this idea! Just because I have a lot of screen real estate doesn't mean I want to spend all of it on a browser window! Sure I can use other workspaces, but I like to keap at least the browser AND the mailer in the same workspace, that's why I bought a big monitor to begin with!
Good, i have a 1680px wide monitor. You still hit websited that are only 800 wide all that time, and dont scale at all. Slashdot does through, theyre good like that. Mmm, widescreen.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
The OS, or at least the OS API seems to be the one rendering text, stock buttons and such, and there is no way to take a linear unit of measurement to make an object of a certain size and expect it to be the same on all computers, 1cm on one screen is .75 on another. I would like a 12 point font to show up as a smooth font on a higher DPI display, but what that does is screw up a lot of dialogue boxes. I think Vista supports this. Whether IE7 would support it is a different issue, it will only if there is a demand for it.
Without changing the dot pitch 2x rendering would make the ducument twice as wide, and that's going to make things worse, not better.
FWIW, I currently see no industry interest in higher pixel density screens, in fact I see the total opposite. Most 19" screens on the market have the same number of pixels as 17" screens. This maybe good for filling a gamer's field of view but documents are much less readable on a 19" LCD than on a 17" one. The only big change which might happen in the near future is that 19" monitors catch up with 17" ones in terms of pixel density.
No sig today...
Scaling is the right approach, but it's the user (*not* the developer) who should be in control. No one else has any right (or even ability) to set pixel sizes on my display. Am I 320x200 or 1920x1440? 3" handheld or 27" plasma? How far from the monitor am I? How many arcseconds per pixel? How good is my eyesight? What colors and contrast levels do I prefer? What font faces am I most comfortable with? If you don't know for absolute sure, then stay the hell out of my settings.
Any page that says "designed for resolution X" is done by a hack. Current web designs scale ok if you stay away from absolute units. Scaling images properly is a royal pain in the ass. But turning browsers into pixel-perfect rendering devices (even by translating CSS pixels into real pixels) is not the answer. Pixel units should be abolished from the CSS spec (along with points, picas, inches, and cm). Everything should be done with em/ex. Just adding rounded corners to CSS would make a lot of image scaling problems disappear. SVG can pick up the slack.
The web is an information exchange conduit, not a graphic design medium.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
However, I would much prefer a standard whereby those wanting higher def could have higher def, and those wanting more content visible could have more content visible. It's all a matter of scaling, once the resolution has been defined.
The main problem with the web - and with GUIs in general - is that they assume that the designer knows better than the user how the user wants things. There are good image formats out there, but very few people use them. SVG has been around for a while, but is rarely implemented. VRML fared no better. Some page styles only work at all at certain resolutions, relying on specific interactions between unscaled pixel-based images and scaled vector fonts.
Part of the problem is that designers have required more and more features, and that different parties have supplied those features in totally incompatible ways - sometimes deliberately so. (JScript was intentionally different from Javascript, for example.) There again, sometimes parties (notably the WWW Consortium) manage to mess things up so much that features never get implemented at all (some HTML standards suffered this fate), only ever get implemented by one very small group (multicast Mosaic, anyone?) or end up being deliberately avoided (font tags, blink tags, backgrounds in tables or table cells, bi-directional text, Java applications as opposed to applets, etc)
As it stands, there is so little agreement on anything and so little uniformity in implementation on the few things that are agreed on, it's a wonder that the web works at all for anyone for any of the time. (Many pages are designed to only work on one specific version of one specific browser on one specific OS with one specific set of utilities installed, so I guess that it is really misleading to call the WWW "world-wide".)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Toss in support for animation, full-motion video, and client-side programming in something other than JavaScript, please. And 3D, while we've got the hood up.
Let's call it XAML. Is that good with everyone?
...you fucked up.
So I can't believe this is even an issue.
I use Opera and all I have to do is hit "-" or "+" and it scales the whole site, images and text alike. I've never had a problem with this feature. IE and Firefox I believe just scale text size, don't quote me on that though.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
Where on earth have you been for the last 15 years... You seem to have the internet though!
Unless your running a Sinclaire in which case i appologise and worship you.
Lots of web designers fuck up. It's an issue.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
And the first people to make use of this will be the: pr0n industry.
Thanks to this new detail in pictures, people will now:
1 - See incision marks on the boobs of those that upped their racks to Alpha-Double-Omega size.
2 - Reveal that the lip job ain't so much a lip job, but more of an infection.
3 - Realise that the hot chicks portal they were surfing all this time, was actually a drag queen sex site.
And the first people to regret making use of this technology will be the: pr0n industry.
Let's say the Web designer uses a 50×50 pixel image for the button. What if you could use a 200×200 image instead?
Let me answer this one: the raster graphics in your site will be close to 4 times larger in bandwidth.
The SVG solution is as viable as ignoring Internet Explorer for a site can be, but of course you can have Flash as a fallback as there are many SVG parsers and renderers written for Flash. Whether you want to do that is another question, as 2-3 pieces of Flash on a page can be ok, but 20-30 can easily kill your CPU and RAM.
Why are we talking about that at all?
The industry is still struggling to get average-DPI screens right and high-DPI screens are still a thing that's "to come any moment now" for quite some time.
An OS lasts a long time and adoption is slow, so it makes sense that OSX and Vista have to be high-DPI ready (Vista already is, and the next OSX also will be I believe).
But a website has a very short span of life and needs to be updated on an almost daily basis, and there's no such thing as "update adoption": next time the user visits the site he gets the latest copy.
So bottom line: sounds like a fad and does more harm than help. Let's have high DPI screen adoption first and people demanding high DPI sites, and it's all a matter of updating your site to reach that audience the moment you upload the changes.
I, for one, welcome our new high-resolution overlords.
(Can we keep it around 1920x1080 for my new High-Def TV?)
Get your Unix fortune now!
BS. My first monitor was 640x480 14 inch jobby. It was ok, but the pixels were very visible. My current monitor is 19" and capable of 1600x1200. I never use that mode for two reasons though. The first is that it's only capable of that at like 50 fps, and the second is that everything seems to specify font size in pixels, so if i put the resolution all the way up to make things look sharper, all the text is tiny.
The demand for better monitors is somewhat limited by the second contention. Why buy a high-rez monitor if it's going to make all the menues uncomfortably tiny?
Firefox in the browser world, and other tools elsewhere help out wrt. the second problem. Websites are all over the place in specifying font sizes though, so gestures comes in really handy for quickly resizing a page immediately after clickage. Unfortunately, putting the fonts at a reasonable size seems to mess up quite a few pages with complicated, hard-coded styles resulting in lots of text overlap or poorly flowing tables and whatnot.
I have decent eyesight, but I don't want all the text on my monitor to look like the system font from fifteen years ago that was all about minimizing memory usage. I want text to look like newsprint or a book. My monitor is capable of this, so why is the software lagging?
The physical size of the text on the screen should be independant of the pixel size of the monitor.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Using px for 2 (or any other number of) pixels per pixel is plainly stupid. Pixel is just a pixel. If web developers used px as measurement, and now they are realising that their design would not work with higher resolutions, it is their stupidity. They should have used device independent units, such as points, millimeters, inches, centimeters, furlongs, miles or whatever is possible to use in CSS.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
is high-contrast websites. What is up with this Ajax shit where you have to squint to see the borders?
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
I fully agree with the point you make, but there are exceptions. Like my current notebook (Fujitsu P7010D) which has only a 10.5 inch (wide)screen, but still with 1280x768 pixels. I can tell you, those pixels ar pretty small!! A nice side effect of higher pixel resolutions is also that when you have a dead pixel, it becomes much less visible. In my case I've one blue pixel constantly on. My dealer was willing to replace the screen, but I left it as it is. You simply don't see it.
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
It's called Flash and it's vector based. Problem is, it's not an offical standard as it still requires the plug-in. But then again, who DOESN'T have it installed?
Life is not for the lazy.
This was just posted: High DPI Part 2
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
He calls upon other browser developers to take part in the discussion so that 'concrete standards in this area can be hammered out.'
If you hammer concrete, it generally breaks...
One word: Flash.
FWIW, I currently see no industry interest in higher pixel density screens, in fact I see the total opposite.
I have no idea what you are basing this on, because manufacturers currently offer a wide variety of displays with a huge range of true DPI.
Many laptops for years have been coming with 15" screens that have 1600x1200 resolution, while the standalone 15" LCD you buy at a store might only have 800x600. I'd say that's a pretty significant difference -- enough that IBM shipped their thinkpads with the "large text" setting as default for many years.
There has been a gradual trend towards increasing physical DPI in devices, simply because we all want crisper text and manufacturing limitations are the only reason we don't. Maybe you're happy seeing individual pixels, but when the average customer sees the quality difference between a 96dpi LCD and a 300 dpi LCD, he'll always prefer the higher -- assuming it doesn't make everything hard to see.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I was thinking the same thing, but this brings up an interesting question. Why doesn't Adobromedia make its own browser? I mean seriously if they came up with something with integrated flash and slick pdf support they could seriously jump into the browser war and might stick it to everyone. Anyone know if Adobe / Macromedia have something like this in the works?
Let's say you have one of the ultra high rez wquxga monitors that's 3840x2400 in 24" (those are real by the way). At a size developed for normal monitors, you wouldn't be able to see anything. One pixel is just not visible with the naked eye. It's the kind of dsiplay you can literally hold a magnifying glass to to get more detail.
However I think they are wrong in that web standards need to deal with this. What should deal with it, and what will allegedly deal with it, is OSes. As OSes gain hardware acceleration of their desktops, real resolution independance becomes easy to achieve. You know the rez of the monitor and its' size (monitors report how large they are). Then you just need the user to specify zoom level. At 100%, a 12 point font is rendered as 12 points, at 50%, it's rendered as 6 points. Graphics could likewise be scaled.
Vista is allegedly supposed to be able to do this, though I'm not sure it'll actually make it in for release. Either way, I suspect it's something comming for all OSes sooner rather than later.
Opera has for a long time supported page "zoom", that allows you to make things bigger, without messing up the layout. IE7 will, as far as I know, have this feature too.
Why all this new standards/browsers/websites talk?
The browser determines how HTML is rendered.
And that pretty much sums it up. This is not a web standard that has to be introduced on a element level within a page - that would be useless as you want to upscale the whole thing. This is a browser rendering issue pure and simple, and can be handled however the browser writers see fit.
However, before thinking about upsclaing, they need to think about a few 'related' issues:
On high DPI displays. For example:
A normal 19" LCD monitor you buy for a desktop is usually 1280x1024. Do the math, it works out to around 90dpi, or perhaps ppi (pixels per inch) is a better term. Ok but now a friend of mine has a laptop that has a screen that's only 15" but 1600x1200. That's about 130dpi. So an image on a typical desktop monitor appears much larger than the same image on that laptop. Actually, when you get down to it, text is hard to read on it, it's so small.
Thus what you need is to scale it up so that if something requests to be displayed as 10 pixels, it's actually displayed as more so it appears larger. This of course goes to even larger extremes with higher resolutions displays. You can get displays that are in excess fo 200dpi. Gets real hard to see anything at a normal size, when normal is made for displays in the 80-90dpi range.
For menus at least, every desktop environment save windows lets you specify the font size of menus and other parts. So grap your upgrade of your OS today! ;)
For much of the remaining text, setting the DPI correctly helps a lot. That leaves the px specified fonts... webdesigners who use these should be summarily shot (with chocolate, e.g.), but the only help there is the zoom, as you write.
I run 1600x1200 on a 21" and 19", and I am quite happy about it. But I don't use windows anymore.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
TFA doesn't render that well in a high dpi environment.
It's good start, but I think it needs one change. They say about the img-element: "the only tradeoff being that the higher resolution artwork would be slower to load on low DPI displays that couldn't render all the detail anyway". To gain widespread adoption, this has to be solved first. A possible solution would be to add an additional "device-pixel-ratio" element to the http request header itself, so a server serves different size of images (jpgs, gifs, pngs) based on the resolution of a requesting device.
1280x768 , is that some kind of ultra ultra wide screen ? :p
... so this means the text is tiny, but that's what i'm used to. maybe at 60 i'd really like to see 2x2 pixels ... but until then, hell no.
i've got a widescreen with 1280x800 over here (and luckily on a 15.4" screen, so i can see the pixels too)
i use x11 with 100dpi fonts, usually size 10 or 11
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Like the OP said, those sites are broken already. So what's the problem? There's no technological solution to the cluelessness of the average web developer.
Ever since the seperation of style and content via CSS, the web has been moving much faster towards the goal of being equally well rendered in every medium. This is why you should measure fonts in ems rather than pixels, and measure other elements in percentages or ems. That way, your site will look just as good on a projector as it will on a mobile phone. With a move to liquid layouts and SVG, and a lack of references to pixels, the devices the webpage will be rendered on should become completely irrelevant to web developers.
there's no login on the fop /. pda page?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
This is a theoretical discussion. There are currently no affordable high DPI monitors available and it doesn't look like this would change in a foreseeable future. All you can get is somewhere between 90 and 120dpi. Years ago, on the CeBIT fair I saw the $10000 IBM display with 200dpi, 3840x2400 pixels or so, driven by four(!) video cards. It was really great. If I could buy something like, I would do...
Troll is correct in his physics statement, as OT as it might be
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Excuse me but isn't a pixel an elementary PICture ELement? If a pixel is rendered as 2x2, this changes the very definition of what a pixel is. While we're at it, we might as well change the metric system so that a meter really means 2 meters.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Yes, I should've said that I use windows. Whenever I've tried linuxes, the font size thingie hasn't really been a problem. Also, Konqueror has had just about the best text I've seen. I'm not even sure why I strayed away from it, except a general feeling of unease about browsing the web with the file manager, even though the same dangers surely exist in a more dedicated browser.
Right on the money.
Just show me the stopwatch you used that is precise enough to notice the acceleration of the moon due to the hammer's gravity. And compare to the effects of the inevitable non-simultaneously dropping of the two objects.
This is a sort of grammar pet peeve for me and I know it's confusing. Laser printer resolution, for example, is gauged by "dots per inch." [Keep this under your hat, but the density of dots you see on printouts are actually a function of the "line-screen"(!)]
It's nuts, but it helps to think of the dots as made of pixels, or dixels.
I'm surprised that Apple often gets this wrong--being in the business of high-quality graphics and all. Quark (God forbid) calls pixels "dots," too. Strange but true: my colleagues in graphic design usually don't know the difference.
Adobe gets it right.
</soapbox>
Thanks for listening
"...objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences, subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny." -Gould
For menus at least, every desktop environment save windows lets you specify the font size of menus and other parts. So grap your upgrade of your OS today! ;)
Please don't spread misinformation. Windows certainly does let you specify the font size of menus. It's right there in the Appearance tab of the Display control panel: you can configure fonts and sizes individually for most UI elements. Alternatively, you can adjust font sizes globally from the Advanced dialog of the same control panel.
(Note that this is Win2k and XP's classic mode I'm talking about; I don't know if you can do this with the new theming engine in XP. But nor do I know anyone who uses the theming engine in XP, so...)
Also, I demand you prove that a horse is a sphere.
Consider a Web page that is designed for an 800×600 resolution.
Okay, this is your first mistake. When you design a web site for a particular resolution you're guaranteed that it will display undesirably on more than 50% of your visitors' screens. Even if my screen is exactly your projected size there is a very good chance I'll be annoyed by having to resize my browser.
In fact, if I have to make my browser window any other size than the one I've set it to in order for your web site to be useful then you've already pissed me off. I'm the customer. You don't want to piss me off.
Its not like this wasn't understood from the first days of NCSA Mosaic nearly 15 years ago. That's why the original specs for html intentionally offered no way to specify pixel placement.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
But nor do I know anyone who uses the theming engine in XP
More fool them. The defaults are pretty lacklustre, but some excellent third-party ones exist.
Anyway, in answer to your real point, yes the options are still available when using XP's theming engine, in exactly the same place they've always been.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Ideally, the solution should be to have a system similar to PDFs that mainly use vector images. Then it shouldn't matter what resolution you're at, you can scale what you're looking at accordingly. And i think this goes beyond the browser, i believe the entire operating system shell should be vector based. It would certainly make the transition to 3D desktops a little more smooth if the entire thing is rendered in 2D.
"1280x768 , is that some kind of ultra ultra wide screen ? :p"
Well, obviously it is 1280:768, or after division by 256, 5:3, or 15:9. So it is almost regular wide screen as in 16:9. Does not seem overly wide to me. But don't take this from me, this is typed on a screen with 16:10 resolution.
By the way, there is such a thing as a SHIFT key. You can find two rather largish keys on both sides of the alphanumeric part of most keyboards. Try and use them once in a while before posting something completely uninteresting.
I have a 17 inch at work which runs at the same resolution as my 19 inch at home (1280x1024). They're LCDs, so they look like crap in anything other than native. The 17 inch makes most things really hard to see, not just fonts, but those tiny icons used all over moden operating systems. Oh, and i upped the DPI, which makes a bunch of programs misbehave and look all gross because they expect a certain standard DPI. I think there's a certain resolution at which monitors display things big enough to read them, and still provide enough clarity. I think many monitors don't follow that. I've seen 17 inch displays that support up to 1600x1200, which is nice and clear, but you can't see a damn thing.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Ever since the seperation of style and content via CSS, the web has been moving much faster towards the goal of being equally well rendered in every medium.
Adapting to different media requires much more than playing around with fonts, sizes, and CSS. Usually, the navigation structure and content itself need to change.
With a move to liquid layouts and SVG, and a lack of references to pixels, the devices the webpage will be rendered on should become completely irrelevant to web developers.
People like you should be kept as far away as possible from creating either software or content for the web; you simply don't have a clue.
If they wanna fix something, fix allowing sites to hard-code their fonts so I can't set it to large to read it. I'm sick and tired of squinting at the screen because some "graphic designed" is sitting there all full of himself, looking at his Sally Struthers School of Internet "Programming" certificate on their cube wall. (Strange, the certificate actually has quotes around "Programming".)
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Though his basic point is valid, he also says that the force exerted upon the feather and the hammer by the moon is identical, which is obviously untrue if they accelerate at the same rate and the hammer has a greater mass than the feather.
(Furthermore, we should note that the result is not that things with greater mass generally hit the ground faster. If you drop one hammer and one feather as in the OP's example, and two identical objects the other side of the moon as their counterparts, with the exact same distance from the moon's radius, then (assuming a moon that is spherical and uniformly distributed with regards to mass) we will get the normally expected result that all the objects hit the ground at the exact same time.)
Where's the flash player reference implimentation so that I can audit it and build native binaries for linux, X-BSD and other OS's running on PPC, XScale, ARM or Alpha?
Where do sites with flash content make the source code availiable or do you expect the security concious to run remote executables behind their firewalls?
The same problems exist with Microsoft's XAML and the prevelence of these half-cooked proprietry technologies is going to impede adoption of the standard.
No XAML, no flash, no executable web!
I'll wait a few years before I start designing sites that will look good on high resolution widescreen monitors. There are not enough people using these monitors yet to make it worth my time and effort to make sure things look extra nice for them.
How many of you have jacked your monitor as high as it can go and THEN increased the size of the fonts so that they were as large on your monitor before you increased the resolution?
What you find is that the fonts look INCREDIBLY better. Much more like reading paper.
Most video cards and monitors can support MUCH higher resolutions and I'd love to surf the web with my monitor at super high resolutions with fonts to proportion (so that they are highly detailed). Problem is a LOT of web sites break horribly because everything around the fonts are not designed for high resolution screens.
Whoever thought it was a good idea to render things in absolute pixel sizes anyways. I can set the browser's default font to 24, only to wind up either on sites where the absolute pixel size is much smaller, at which point I turn to View|Text Size|Increase, which isn't sticky, or I wind up on sites where they use absolute pixel size some of the time, which results in some text being small.
(But they cheated: the font definitions had extra information for hinting and scaffolding.)
So does TrueType, even if Microsoft's TrueType renderer is defective and most TrueType fonts in the wild have defective hints. But unfortunately, free software distributed in the United States cannot use the hints in TrueType until October 13, 2009 and must substitute its own hints.
those tiny icons used all over moden operating systems
This is a defect in your operating system's desktop environment for supporting non-scalable icons. Mac OS X uses 128x128 pixel icons that are scaled as needed, and many Free desktop environments can use scaled-down or even SVG icons.
Oh, and i upped the DPI, which makes a bunch of programs misbehave and look all gross because they expect a certain standard DPI.
If programs require 96dpi, then that's a defect. Don't use those programs, and make sure to report the defect to the publisher.
I have a 15:9 widescreen too, with an ATI controller, and when I shift to normal resolutions, it either scrolls the display or stretches the pixels aspect ratio. What do the manufactuers have against black boxes to the sides of the screen. I wish that when they had 320x200 resolution they had put 20 pixels of dead space on top and bottom, but they didn't. Doesn't make sense to me.
Developers are already capable of setting height and width in measurements other than pixels(em, percent).
True, but if you scale a GIF, JPEG, or PNG image using em or %, all publicly available web browsers are defective such that they will use (horrid) nearest-neighbor resampling instead of (prettier) bilinear interpolation. In Firefox, this defect has been reported as Bug 98971 in bugzilla.mozilla.org.
this is why the people invented 'em' and '%'...
Wouldn't a handkerchief full of snot (and viruses..) be a more appropriate object?
This being cleared up, now lets get on to the subject:
While it is physically true that the heavier object hits the moon first, this doesn't imply superiority. Think of it as the pig head (or hammer) crashing more quickly than the feather. Oh, and, despite recent small losses, feathers still outnumber pig heads by more than a factor of 2. So there!
Most humans have two eyes next to each other, which means that they have a significantly larger horizontal field of view than a vertical one.
If the two eyes are not pointed at the same point, this is called exotropic strabismus and is deemed an eye disorder.
Not saying I wouldn't have missed it, but as I recall, I could choose between "normal" (way to small) and "large" (still too small, and breaks a lot of stuff both in windows itself and applications). I have no way to test, since window's inferior cost/benefit means it has been replaced on all my computers.
If this is wrong, good, but what I said was to the best of my knowlegde, and I resent the implication otherwise
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Unfortunately, our eyes are not as elastic as our window resize controls. They have trouble scanning lines of text that are wider than 40em (80 columns); research suggests that the optimum is 30em. This wouldn't be a problem, except Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 does not support the max-width property of CSS.
Of course! SVG porn is called H manga.
"Current "high resolution" screens are bigger, not more densely pixelled." The 15.4" 1920x1020 screen in many newer laptops would disagree.
In addition to having been the first browser to let you scale images together with text, Opera lets you apply "high quality" scaling to true-color images, that is bicubic interpolation. I love high density LCDs, and on my 128 dpi laptop monitor (15.4" at 1680x1050 pixels, do the math) Opera is perfect for letting me choose between "lots of tiny text and stuff" and "reasonable amount of detailed text and stuff". Of course, enlarging bitmaps with interpolation doesn't make them more detailed, but it's much better than nearest-neighbour scaling. Just Ctrl-scroll wheel and set the page to the desired level of magnification/detail.
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
You can specify image sizes in em by using CSS. See this tutorial. This allows browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer to scale them.
Until this page no longer looks blocky, it won't be workable. Go fix bugzilla.mozilla.org bug 98971 if you want something done about it.
try running 640x480 mode on a stock 1280x1024 LCD [...] it looks aliased and overall pretty bad
If you can set the LCD to use only 960 of those 1024 vertical pixels, it might look better. Unfortunately, I've never seen an LCD priced for use in homes or in university computer labs that supports this feature.
It's called Flash
I don't have $700 for Macromedia Flash because I graduated in 2003, have been volunteering for a year, and am still looking for paying work. Other technologies have much cheaper entry costs for bloggers and other hobbyists. How do I make an SWF?
"FWIW, I currently see no industry interest in higher pixel density screens, in fact I see the total opposite. Most 19" screens on the market have the same number of pixels as 17" screens. This maybe good for filling a gamer's field of view but documents are much less readable on a 19" LCD than on a 17" one."
FWIW one of Vista's selling points is that it uses vector based rendering so it can use higher DPI monitors without shrinking all the text. Years ago (meaning I have no idea now if this is still being considered) there was an announcement that Microsoft was working with a LCD manufacturer to release a 5000+ pixel wide monitor. That may or may not happen any time soon, but a couple of years ago I worked at a company with monitors running at 2560 by 1920. For what we were doing, that was great. But for desktop apps, that was a little hard on the eyes. There's no industry interest, yet.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Always provide the large image and scale down.
So what happens on older machines with 800x600 pixels and dial-up Internet connections? On mobile phones with small screens and billing by the bit? You need image formats that let the browser close the connection once enough of the image has been downloaded to cover the device's resolution. Progressive JPEG is one; JPEG2000 is another once bugzilla.mozilla.org bug 36351 is fixed.
yea, it seems the OP meant not the force, but the acceleration, which is initially identical.
he also forgot to mention that the hammer and the feather would need to be placed orthogonal to the path of the moon to avoid the need to think about swing-by effects.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Just get Browser to fully support Scaleable viewing content.
Heck even IE7 on XP does this now, zoom in and out to any resolution, the Graphics/text keep the page formatting the same, and look crisper on higher resolution screens...
Why complicate the design standards when this can be easily solved inside the browsers as even Freaking IE7 has demonstrated?
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Excuse me but isn't a pixel an elementary PICture ELement?
The atom was once thought indivisible, but it has elements. The proton was later divided into quarks and gluons. Likewise, the pixel is already divided into red, green, and blue subpixels under ClearType, so why not divide it into northwest, northeast, southwest, and southeast pixels?
Besides, the W3C recommendation that defines CSS length units doesn't necessarily define "pixel" to refer to any picture element. On high-resolution output devices, a pixel is 1/2688 radians of visual angle.
"Do the math, it works out to around 90dpi, or perhaps ppi (pixels per inch) is a better term."
If we are going to go down that road, then the "best" term for it whould be "square root of pixels per inch" or sqrt(p)pi.
FRA: STFU GTFO
A lot of /. seems to look at this issue as a technology or even a web technology issue.... but from a designer's POV it's always been a communication arts issue having to do with compositional layout, not html layout.
What this means is that we designers are very concerned about proportions and the size/scale relationship between type on the page and graphics on the page.
Given this statement, the existing option of using relative sized type that will scale relative to other type on the page and maintain that relationship... is only half of the equation.... the compositional layout still ends up broken, ie: the important graphic on the page no longer has the hierarchical and visual importance it was supposed to have in the design because all the text on the page is suddenly 2X bigger and the visual combination of text and graphic no longer communicates the message effectively and has become a cramped, chunky, messy version of what it was intended to be.
This explanation is why a designer may choose to use pixel sizes for a particular layout instead of using relative sizes.
Additionally, a designer would modify a compositional layout of the same content, given the option, if there are two or more set dimensional targets... simply because each dimensional size may have a optimal layout to best communicate the message, ie: a landscape design compared to a portrait design or better yet a letter page sized design compared to a magazine page design.... and this is due to the fact that there is more space available and a different balance of space and content is required, which means different margins, different graphic sizes, etc, etc... but not simply a scaled up version.
An analogy for the uber geek would be to think in terms of physics and nature.... the bumblebee, we all know that the bumblebee at any other scale would not be able to fly with it's current proportions of wing/body/mass... basically a given design won't always continue to work if you simply scale it up proportionally.
To sum up, any tools that will allow us to more effectively do our job of communicating will get our support. This doesn't mean the tools won't be abused by some, in fact some designers will take it as a challenge to abuse the tool to the extreme and will simply call this 'cutting edge' design, even though the more experienced designers will look at it and call it 'cutting room floor' design.
So flame on about standards and liquid designs, just know that until the standards and technology accomodate good visual design practice and methodology (which has been around a lot longer and has a much more mature heritage, more research done and more results in real use) then designers will continue to ignore them when they get in the way.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
..not only will a lot of websites have CSS that renders as poorly overlapped near impossible to read text globs,like I am seeing in a lot of places now, but I will have to scroll back and forth left to right up and down the page because I have an older normal CRT monitor?
The moon asserts a greater force on the hammer, but it also has to overcome the hammer's greater inertia. The contradictory forces negate each other, and both hit simultaneously.
DATABASE WOW WOW
You're sure you don't have a way to select either aspect-correct scaling or none at all? That seems a little odd to me.
Good points. Thanks for the input. Also, would it be accurate to describe the uneven force on the moon as a torque?
Fitting more on-screen, particularly on wide-screen monitors, is a useful idea, but a separate issue covered in other articles.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Your're missing a couple important points. First, a 200 dpi display can render text and images twice as clearly as a 100 dpi display at the same size. Although you clearly like tiny text and interface elements, many of us do not (or at least don't want them all the time), and would prefer to use all the pixels that our hardware supports for something we do want: extra crispness. And second, although monitors mostly stop at the resolutions you mentioned, most user's don't make use of them, and a lot of use would like to, even if we don't want the extra screen space.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
On a related note, it was one of those great Apple moments when I noticed Safari was actually capable of high resolution printing of images on a web page. For example, when instructing it to print a 800 x 600 pixel image at 8cm by 6cm, it would actually squeeze all those pixels in.
Even today, many browsers simply print out the pixels as if rendered on screen first, in other words a pixelated blob.
What made the Apple moment one of those really great ones was that I had actually submitted a wish for this. I'm sure I wasn't the only one, but it felt nice. And it wasn't the first time
J
To the web browser!
There is now an extra large, and at least large does not screw stuff up as much as in the past.
If I am not mistaken extra large still screws up text under desktop icons somewhat, and on some applications diologe boxes text gets trunkated.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Graphics could likewise be scaled.
Yes, they can--but scaled graphics will never look as good as higher-resolution source graphics. The entire point of what he's talking about is enabling web developers to have pages with images that look fantastic when scaled up, rather than looking like a page with small images that have been automatically scaled by the OS/browser.
I remember seeing in 1986 or so, a 300-dpi crt monitor. It was monochrome, and probably only 1-bit/pixel, and was page-oriented (taller than wide). However it seemed pretty impressive, as it was exactly the same resolution as the laser printers at that time, and using monochrome 1-bit/pixel was still pretty common at that time. This was at a trade show (siggraph?). Certainly it would seem very useful to somebody writing documents, or reading them.
Anyway it's pretty obvious that idea was a dead end. I'm sure there were technical problems in that software had to be rewritten to use it. I'm sure the lack of color was a problem (and could not be solved, as crt color masks can't be made that resolution). But still it sounds like it would be useful, but never saw it in the real world.
Some other people made comments that the problem is that programs specify font sizes in pixels instead of points or something. This is misleading. Both X and Windows actually did specify fonts in "points", the problem is that *everything else*, such as lines and boxes, were specified in pixels. Trying to draw in two different coordinate systems with an almost arbitrary relationship is impossible, so programs would break badly when you went to a different system with a different DPI. Windows initially fixed this by allowing font sizes to be negative to indicate size in pixels, and then finally (win95 or 8?) just fixed the scale between "points" and "pixels" to be 4/3, ignoring the DPI resolution. X has still not figured this out and you still get screwed up output if you plug in the wrong monitor, but the newest api (Cairo) does get rid of specifying fonts in anything other than the same units as drawing, *finally*!!!
Yes, I'm sure. The closest things are in Display|Advanced|ATI Displays|Preserve wide aspect ratio on attached displays, which only affects how the image looks on an attached monitor, not the laptop's LCD screen, or I can click on the LCD screen in that section and uncheck Scale image to panel size, which will cause resolutions lower than 1280x800 to have bars all around them as opposed to just on the sides. (I did discover that second option just now, though I had been aware of it on other laptops before.)
The linked post was written by Dave Hyatt. He's been a Safari developer since the beginning of the Safari project, before which he worked on Mozilla, Chimera, Camino, Firefox, etc. The idea that he doesn't know that browsers control rendering is absurd.
What you seem to be missing is that rendering is a cooperative effort, where the developer of the page does have some input into the rendering process. This post is describing two things: first, some best practices for looking good when your page is scaled by the browser (e.g., use SVG where possible), and second, ways the standards could help things look good.
The idea of being able to tailor your page when you know something about the rendering is not new to CSS. Take printing for example: you could just as well say that printing is something the browser decides how to do, so it's irrelevant to site developers--but it's not; developers can use a different style sheet to tailor the page in order to give the user a better experience of the site in print form.
The entire world of web development is a combination of browser design and web design; trying to solve every problem in just one place or the other ignores the reality of the web, and leads to suboptimal solutions. "Just render the page as you would then blow everything up by a factor of x" would be a browser-only solution, but it would give uglier results than the cooperative approach being proposed here.
That's where word wrapping should come in. It seems to me that sometimes it's completely the browsers fault, but I don't understand why most websites turn word wrapping off.
Yeah, and nobody will ever need more than 640kb.
Are people really being so short-sighted that they can't see that vector-based graphics and interfaces (Vista and OS X Leopard) will fuel demand for very high resolution screens?
"Sufferin' succotash."
How does one graph y=x^2-5x+3 in SVG? One can graph it in LaTeX using PSTricks, and then convert it to SVG (I've written a script to do this). The problem is that such a conversion uses lots of small bezier curves to render the graph in SVG. One could get a smaller file by converting to PNG.
It's an issue because as monitors gain more and more screen fidelity, you want to use those extra pixels to increase text and graphics readability, not shrink them because your interface is tied to the ancient concept of relying on little square things called pixels. And when you scale up, you want to be able to use higher fidelity images so that they're not blurry from the scaling. This isn't about sites requiring a certain DPI for readability. It's about making it so when you're using a 1920 resolution in a 19" screen (as in the article author's Dell XPS laptop), you can still read the damn thing.
In other words, if you truly understood the issue, you wouldn't be saying that since it has nothing to do with the web site author. It's the interface displaying the web page that needs to compensate for the high DPI of the user's display so that a unit of distance is always the same no matter how many pixels.
Quoth the article:
But hey, you're right, nobody needs higher DPI. We should all have to read things using a magnifying glass and rely forever on pixels and absolute sizes and assumptions that a system pixel is the same as a device pixel. And nobody'll ever need more than 640kb.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I've been reading through the comments and it doesn't seem like the concept here is being grasped. What Hyatt is proposing is meant to be used in conjunction with an OS scaling feature. It is not going to change the way web pages are created, or force you to use a larger font, or anything else. He's simply proposing a way of improving the display of content when the OS is using a scale factor other than 1x.
We have a bunch of flat-panel 17" displays in the office. The native resolution of these displays is 1280x1024. But many people (especially those whose eyesight is not as good as it once was) set their screen resolution at 1024x768, so that the text is readable to them. Because the LCD still has to render into a fixed 1280x1024 pixel grid, the 1024x768 image has to be scaled up to fit the display, which blurs everything as the LCD tries to invent the missing pixels. And people begin to think that flat panels are fuzzier than CRTs. This is even worse with some of the new laptop LCDs that are displaying 1600x1200 on a 15" display -- most text is completely unreadable at that resolution if you don't have perfect eyesight. Heck, I have 20/20 vision and I still find it too small. But setting a lower resolution makes it even worse.
What is needed is a means of scaling up content at the OS's own graphics layer, so that a person can basically emulate a 1024x768 display, but it will still use all of the pixels of the panel. Uniformly, across the system, more pixels will be used to render fonts, icons, images, etc. This provides people with the larger physical size of running in a lower resolution, but with the full clarity of the panel's pixel grid.
This feature is what is being implemented in Windows Vista and (presumably) Mac OS X 10.5. It already exists in an early form in Mac OS X 10.4. This is the scenario that Hyatt is addressing.
The scaling of the UI happens transparently to the software developer: he or she still deals in pixels. But a pixel will only actually show up as a single pixel on the LCD panel if the scale factor of the OS is left at 1x. If it's set to 2x, four pixels will be used. The point is that it is up to the user to set the size of all elements in the system, it's not a developer deciding how large or small the user will see things.
This scaling up of elements is easy enough if they are vector-based. Everything will be nice and crisp. But what of bitmap images, such as icons? By default, they will simply be scaled up much as the LCD panel would do by itself with a lower-resolution input, inventing pixels for the missing data. But what if you actually have higher-resolution data to fill in those missing pixels? You might as well fill it in so that the display is sharper. You would need some way of knowing when the system is scaling up the UI, and you'd provide a higher-resolution image in that case. Mac OS X has begun to accomodate (in 10.4) 256x256 icons for this purpose, so that a 2x scale factor can be used and the normal 128x128 icon size used in some views can remain fully detailed. APIs have been introduced to tell the OS that you're handling the drawing for a particular view and will fill in the appropriate level of detail (so that an app like Photoshop could render more detail at a different scale factor rather than having its bitmaps scaled by the system).
This is where the "High DPI" comes in for web pages: if the user has a high-DPI display (i.e. high resolution on a small screen), and if the user has a scale factor set for the OS, then the web developer ought to have the option of providing more detailed images that fill in the missing pixel data. The web browser would need a means of knowing the system scale factor and possibly loading alternate images that provide greater resolution. Obviously, larger images will require more bandwidth, so ideally we'd be using vector images instead of bitmaps for most things -- hence the inclusion of SVG in Safari.
That's all that's being discussed here. Not a new method of creating web pages, not new elements, not a redefinition of terms. Simply providing an option to provide more data if the display can make use of it.
Mapping web "pixels", to more than one local pixel is "Zoom".
:-)
This isn't some broken text-only Zoom as implemented by IE and FF, but a true Zoom where everything on the page is resized, images, widgets, etc.
Besides the ability to "Zoom in", Opera also has the ability to "Zoom out".
So if you want to fit more on your screen, you can make pages smaller down to whatever size you can still read.
I find the properly implemented Zoom feature one of the best qualities in the Opera browswer. Um...great use for the Firefox Extension "Start in Opera" if you usually use FF; not that I'd know about that extension for any reason.
-l
I'm not saying people don't need higher DPI. I'm saying that if your website design depends on a certain DPI for readability, then you fucked up.
You know that site that forces the font to be 12px instead of 12pt? Or the one that has adorable little GIF/PNG highlights that become miniscule on a high-res monitor? bad bad bad bad bad!
The author of the article is trying to say, "Well, here's how you can support higher DPI." What I'm saying is that you shouldn't have used the stupid 12px font and tiny adorable GIF highlights in the first place.
There's a third option for "Custom size..." on the "Advanced" dialog of the "Settings" tab which gives you a ruler you can adjust so that 1 inch really is 1 inch. On the few occasions I've bothered to use it I've never found a Windows system that was actually displaying 1 inch at the same size as 1 inch on a real ruler held up to the screen, but that's probably just to do with the monitors I was using. On the other hand I didn't see any breakage in Windows, but I found that once the custom size was set correctly it was best to adjust the individual font size settings for all the different Windows elements (menu item, icon text, etc.) in the "Advanced appearance" dialog.
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
In OS X there is a feature called Zoom in the univsersal access pane. You simply hit option-command-8 and then opt-cmd-= or opt-cmd-- to zoom in-and-out of any part of the screen. I often use this for non-liquid sites that I expect to read for a while.
OS based zooming means that all images are scaled properly as well. Although the text is not as sharp as it can be at times the improved readability more than offsets the slight loss in text sharpness.
... it has nothing to do with the web site author. It's the interface displaying the web page that needs to compensate for the high DPI
I'm not sure I understand/agree here. It is the web site author that states, in CSS, "render this 10 pixels high". It's the web site author that creates a raster graphic 10 pixels high.
Today, the user agent does what the web author says, and renders that display element, font or image using 10 pixels of the monitor.
You're saying that even though the page's author specifically said 10 pixels, that this problem is, in fact, the fault of the user agent for doing what the author said?
The W3C would seem to agree with you in that they state that 1px in CSS isn't actually supposed to correspond to exactly 1 display pixel, but this doesn't extend to imagery or other display elements not styled with px units in CSS.
To split the difference for a factor of two, scale the objects by the square root of two. To split the difference for a factor of 9, scale the objects by a factor of 3.
And what about desktop screens. I'd love a proper high resolution LCD to match what decent CRTs have done for ages. I had an Iiyama Vision Master Pro 454 - a 19" CRT (18" viewable) which worked well for me with a resolution of 1792x1344, although I did occasionally drop to 1600x1200. A 19" LCD is a bigger viewable screen with only 1280x1024 pixels.
So current LCDs are the total opposite of the higher pixel densities for desktops at least. A guy at work has a Sony laptop with a 17" widescreen, 1920x1200 screen and it really is fantastic. I just wish somebody would put the panel in a desktop monitor and I'd go out immediately and buy 2 to replace my current pais of 22" CRTs. But like Joce says, there's no industry interest at all, and I can't buy such a product, even though it is obviously feasible.
That's pretty lame. What you want is to scale your image but preserve the aspect ratio, right? Putting black bars on the left and right? I asked because my setup does support that, and I figured you might have just missed the option.
That option requires DVI connection between graphics and monitor. Ifthat is satisifed, it should work, but again it is ATi (trolling)
On the desktop there's a pretty fixed dot pitch though. Go to a store and look - very few 19" monitors will do more than 1280x1024, and that's an awful dot pitch for anything other than gaming.
I bet a lot of people are buying 19" inch monitors thinking "bigger is better" when in reality it's worse.
No sig today...
if you try to interpolate you have serious problems when images are supposed to have hard lines
If you're concerned about destroying pixeled edges, run Scale2x, a non-linear interpolator, on the images before bilinear resampling them.
or there are a large number of images on the screen
Modern 3D video cards perform full-screen bilinear resampling with rotation and multitexturing 60 times a second.
It doesnt seem that ANYONE has even considered certain implications of doing such complicated things... image scaling, automatic detection, scaleable SVG's, along with Java, flash, animated gifs, and larger images... the internet runs slowly enough on most peoples computers already, thank you very much. As of now, my web browser is using 50MB of ram, and quite a bit of CPU power to render 10 simple-ish webpages. Now imagine if those webpages were all trying to automatically go at high resolution, automatically, scaling images and loading SVG's, and Java, mayby even Flash Ads, all at the same time. My computer would be under more load than when playing games! It would be unuseable! And just think - my computer is reasonably fast - what about my dad, or all those other non-computer-savvy people out there, who are using high-resolution displays with the text size increased (people with bad vision like big displays), on low speed computers? And then theres the dialup users. One things for certain, rather than automatically applying high resolution, it should either ask the user and warn of the implications, or it should have a button on the page to make it high rez (thus making low-rez the default), similar to the "compact" button on the top right hand side of digg.com. It should NOT automatically assume that high resolution/high dpi settings implies the user has high speed internet and a fast computer.
Yes. The FireFox extension "NoScript" blocks Flash/Javascript/cookies by default. I even have the IE plug-in "patched" so I do not see them there either. I refuse to give marketing driods carte blanche to use MY computer to push their punchable monkies and silently track stuff I probably do not want them to know. My whitelist is very small, and cookies are generally only allowed per session. I do NOT need drop down menus or animated buttons. Its obnoxious beyond description not being able to deeplink past all the script junk because the only access is clicking thru a menu tree. Oh and my email is sent/received in plain text. They can keep their shiney crud to themselves.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
For the second time, you're bitching about something that has absolutely nothing to do with the article. Using points instead of pixels doesn't change the fact that using a 1920w 15" screen means your text will be smaller, as will your graphics. Using 12pt instead of 12px does nothing to change that.
The article has to do with the difference between system pixels and device pixels. OS X Leopard (and Vista) will be using a resolution-independent UI that allows scaling. The article proposes several methods for allowing higher-fidelity images in the event your image is upscaled, and it also provides SVG.
What I'm saying is that you shouldn't have used the stupid 12px font and tiny adorable GIF highlights in the first place.
I already addressed px, but image resizing is exactly what the damn article is addressing. You're saying that web designers shouldn't have used images in the first place? Please, get a clue.
"Sufferin' succotash."
You're saying that even though the page's author specifically said 10 pixels, that this problem is, in fact, the fault of the user agent for doing what the author said?
Absolutely. Maybe you didn't read the article, but it's talking about scaling for resolution-independent interfaces. If the user agent treats a px literally as a px, then everything shrinks when you get on a 1920w 15" screen, like on the Dell XPS laptop owned by the author.
The W3C would seem to agree with you in that they state that 1px in CSS isn't actually supposed to correspond to exactly 1 display pixel, but this doesn't extend to imagery or other display elements not styled with px units in CSS.
Which is why images are upscaled, and the article provides methods for including higher-fidelity versions in CSS in the event your image is resized. Also, SVG is provided.
"Sufferin' succotash."
GUI's and dynamic pages that manipulate elements (move, resize or align them) need to work in pixel units.
I can't believe I would be talking up pixels as I battle to get them out of our CSS files.
But there are different needs for declaration (CSS) and manipulation.
In firefox:
View >> Text Size >> Increase
Or Ctrl + + if your are loath to move your hands from the keyboard.
The only way to tell the difference between a hamster and a gerbil is that the hamster has more white meat.
All modern operating systems have a mechanism to tell their GUI applications the *real* resolution of the display (in DPI), so applications can easily calculate the actual dimensions of any windows they are displaying.
Currently those mechanisms are not generally being used properly, because screen resolutions aren't generally high enough for scalable graphical elements to look right (which actually has the annoying side effect of retarding progress in this area, but...). As display resolutions approach aprox. 150 dpi, I expect that operating system developers will get their act together and default to resolution-independant display systems.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
PDAs run around 320x320, and this WIDO thing gives them fast download speeds.
People that don't make felxible web pages are idiots. Everything should be tested in lynx
All this talk about SVG is cute, except for the fact that nobody will ever use it. Why not ? Because web designers use Photoshop.. bitmaps.. that's what they know. SVG = not a bitmap.
What we should have had YEARS ago is true full-page scaling. If I want large fonts, I'd like everything else to scale along with it. Just use a good quality Lanczos transform on the images, render the fonts natively sine they're vectors.. that way layouts and menus won't be out of whack, and we'll be able to read crisp, large text that's easy on the eyes.
Game developers (myself included) have been doing scaling for over a decade.. in real-time! So what are we all waiting for ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Great. Now we will not only have trouble making things go where we want them to on the screen, we will have to guess if the user is running in pixel doubled mode.
This is absolute bullsh*t. HTML should have gone to SVG a LONG LONG time ago. Working with actual pixel numbers is stupid for both web development and desktop development - I was amazed that MS decided to keep pixels when they unified the forms for desktop and web into one entity.
If we were working on a 1x1 canvas, we could even have anti-aliasing on our desktops.
Check out http://sourceforge.net/buzz-like for an example of an application that is both independent of resolution and allows the user to scale the interface.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
I agree 100% -- if you search the slashdot archives, you'll even find an article of mine from 2000 or so begging for information on where to buy a 15" or 17" 1600x1200 desktop LCD (and many people chimed in to say they were searching as well). We had an entire office full of people who would have paid the $2000 our IBM thinkpads cost just to get the Thinkpad's LCD -- it's amazing no company has offered this product.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Using 12pt instead of 12px does nothing to change that.
Uhm... what OS are you using? OSX, Windows and Linux all let you adjust the size of the font you're viewing based on the DPI of the monitor, and have done so for the better part of a decade.
You're saying that web designers shouldn't have used images in the first place?
Images don't scale, they impose arbitrary size restrictions, they dramatically increase the bandwidth required to load a page (and the hit on the server), and in most cases, they're ugly, too. So yes, I'm saying they shouldn't have used images in the first place. And I'm right to do so for these reasons.
You assume that he's running an OS that uses that system.
Not trying to leave digital tinder here, but that kind of assumption makes you look quite pretentious.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Read the article. He's talking about ways of allowing the user to set a Zoom factor in his browser if he chooses, and for web designers to provide alternate content depending on the detected screen size for people who set Zoom sizes. Including using SVG content which is resolution independent. So for instance they get a higer rez image instead of a blown up pixellated image.
But if you want tiny text and images on your 1600x1200 screen, so be it, you don't have to choose a Zoom factor. Modern browsers already have the ability to enlarge text, some even allow Page zoom, but in a way that doesn't get you a sharper/more detailed image.
Does anyone think this is the first time this problem has come up? In the early 90s, a 'big' screen was 800x600 pixels. Lots of people were still using 640x480. That is what all the advice which we have been giving you for a decade about NEVER using absolute positioning and absolute sizes on the Web is all about.
You do not control the size of the real estate your page is rendered on. You do not control the number of pixels per inch. You do not control the visual acuity of your users' eyes. And you never did! If your site does not work as well on a mobile phone as on a 3000x2000 pixel display, then, as a web designer, you've failed. No-one else is to blame, you're to blame. You can't do your job.
Messing about with pixel values is pointless, because if you're using pixel values you have already failed. Of course, yes, there is a problem with the size of graphic elements. That's why we should be using Scalable Vector Graphics wherever possible; this is why it's serious that some browser vendors are still dragging their feet on native SVG support. But that doesn't excuse you, the designer. Your job as a designer is to work with the web you've got, which includes crappy antique browsers. Get on with it.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Some bitmapped fonts are extremely readable. The IBM "VIO" fonts that shipped with OS/2 are a prime example -- I find them easier to read than any fonts I've found for Linux, for example.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
In other words he wasn't right, and neither were you.
Lets say we communicated on a level above the verbatim and eventually refined the statements.I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
...tell ME they aren't going to do this too.
A pixel is a pixel is a pixel, not a 2 by 2 pixel block or anything else. Yes sometimes pixels are big and other times they are small. THAT'S THE WAY IT'S ALWAYS BEEN. Web developers that are complaining that their websites render too small because of high-definition screens are dumbasses for basing their whole layout on pixels to begin with. Pixel-based layouts bother me just as much as flash-heavy and/or over-animated websites. The fact that web developers insiste on relying on pixel based websites almost makes me reconsider my stance against capital punishment. Seriously.
If you want to use fixed layouts then use pt or em. THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE FOR! They are always supposed to be the same size--in particular pt is supposed to be 1/72 of an inch regardless of screen resolution, and user agents can allow viewersd to scale at will if they wish (view at over 100% perhaps, if you have difficulty seeing, or 50% to let people like you with a fetish for all things small see more at once). You can also use inches, centimetres or millimetres of you don't like using print media conventions. Problem solved--your website is now independent of screen resolution.
The ONLY time any web developer should EVER consider using px is if you need to align with a bitmap. Even then it is rarely needed because you can scale a bitmap to the above-mentioned units anyways. If bitmaps look ugly scaled then maybe the creators of user agents should put a bit more effort into doing a better job of scaling them, and improve (or add) support for vector images (the world would be a much better place if the craptacular IE had at least basic native support for SVG--Shame on ME, and kudos to the Mozilla team for stepping up in that department).
So you are going to sit there and claim that: ab/c==sqrt(a)*sqrt(b)/c?
FRA: STFU GTFO