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.'"

Comments

Re:Please no...

[Solra Bizna]

Nobody's forcing you to look at a website in high DPI, they're just enabling you to do so.

-:sigma.SB

Bad idea in so many ways

[Kasracer]

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...

Re:Bad idea in so many ways

[JanneM]

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).

That approach is already broken; when the user overrides font and font sie with their own (a perfectly legitimate thing to do) this easily ends up looking like garbage. IF you want "ultimate control over your design", publish a PDF.

Fortunately, and unlike your assertion, most sites do not do this, and adapt quite well already. In fact, quite a lot of sites (nytimes.com, for example) look distincty better once you overrride their font choices.

Compatible

[Kangburra]

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.

Re:Please no...

[CODiNE]

An eagle-eyed developer may enjoy being able to have many open windows crammed into the same amount of space, but many of us would like our apps to remain more or less the same size and don't want to have to squint to read text.

That part is talking about YOU.

The full solution to this problem therefore is to allow your user interface to scale, with the scale factor being configurable by the user. This means that Web content has to be zoomable, with the entire page properly scaling based off the magnification chosen by the user.

This part is talking about ME. People with high DPI and not so great vision would like to be able to scale pages. If you RTFM you'd see that it's optional and he's suggested SVG ... that is vector graphics as a BACKUP image to be used IF and only IF the user has configured their browser to "zoom" the websites for higher DPI. That way fonts look good and larger images look good too, yet they won't be sending huge GIF's and JPEGS, or even compressed PNGs, instead you'll get a nice smooth 30k image that looks beautiful no matter what your resolution.

Sounds damn good to me!