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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.'"
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!
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)
This was just posted: High DPI Part 2
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
If a site requires the user to manually set their browser's font in order for the page to look good and be legible, then the designer of the page did not do their job properly.
But that's sort of the qhole point of this article: the designer just don't have the information needed to make sure the page looks good and is legible for all its users. Ultimately, you can not know what size and typeface I prefer or need. So you do need some solution to make it look reaonable across a wide range of device parameters and preferences.
Really, _tight_ design control on the web is a pipe dream. The successful designs are made to still look good despite a great deal of unanticipated variation in the end result. Those designers who go all posterior orifice over it and create brittle designs that may look "pixel perfect" on a narrow range of outputs, and fail badly on the rest.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.
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.
If you're not aware, the CSS "px" unit is defined in the standard as a specific angle of the viewer's vision. In the case of a user sitting ~18in from a ~90DPI display, that works out to one device pixel per "px", or 3/4 of a point.
Range Voting: preference intensity matters