[thelist] A pixel is not a pixel

Peter-Paul Koch gassinaumasis at hotmail.com
Sat Jun 16 07:33:33 CDT 2001


I finally have the time to respond to this.

> >>Opera 5 for the Mac, which in fact renders pixel text on a Mac
> >>considerably smaller than pixel text on a Windows machine.
> >
> >In my opinion this is still a bug, regardless of the newest pixel theory.
>
>I think it's been one of those parts of the standard that wasn't looked at 
>very closely until Opera implemented it, and now we see it we're a little 
>unnerved by it.

No, I think nearly everyone will ignore it and say "Opera Mac shows text too 
small". The alternatives are to show your text too large in all other 
browsers or to write a special style sheet for OpMac (yuck!).

The problem is that one little lone browser cannot win by saying "I follow 
the specs and all you others don't!" In some cases (and this is one) the 
specs are just too complicated to follow and have no connection with the 
daily reality of web development.

For the web developer, the current browsers are the measure of all things, 
not the W3C specs. If the browsers happen to conform to the specs, good, if 
they don't, follow them, not the specs.

> >I look at it from the opposite point of view: all browsers show the 
>sametext size except for Op5Mac, ergo: Op5Mac does not conform to the 
>de-facto standard.
>
>That dog won't hunt. No standards-compliant browser conforms to the de 
>facto standard.

But there are no pure standards-compliant browsers. I've had this discussion 
more than once and my mind is set: there is a de-facto standard, set by the 
actual browsers now in use, and any browser not conforming to it will have 
trouble. That the de-facto standard differs from the W3C standard is 
irrelevant, it's the standard everyone uses when developing web sites.

Of course, if all browsers choose to go over to the real W3C standards in 
every particular, the de-facto standard will change. If that is the case, 
we'll all have to change our CSS tricks with it. But I won't do it before 
this actually happens.

>Type specified at 10px, according to the CSS standard, should render at the 
>exact same visible height, regardless of the size and resolution of the 
>monitor.

Now this I don't believe. If you're right, we basically cannot choose a 
resolution for our monitors any more, because everything will show up the 
same size anyway, so it's useless. We're forced to abide by the resolution 
the monitor vendor has chosen for us.

> >If a pixel is defined as 1/90th of an inch and an inch contains either 72 
>or  96 pixels (depending on the OS), somewhere something must be terribly 
>wrong.
> >These two definitions simply don't go together, only one of them can be 
>true.
>
>Yes they can both be true, and yes, there *is* something wrong here. The 
>standard reference pixel is a hypothetical creation, defined to be 1/90th 
>of an inch. Windows reports its monitors to be 96ppi and MacOS reports its 
>monitors to be 72ppi, if the browser asks. The actual monitor attached to 
>the system will have real, not hypothetical pixels, with a density of still 
>another ppi, almost guaranteed *not* to be either 96ppi or 72ppi (though in 
>a happy accident for Windows users, they are usually closer to 96ppi than 
>72ppi; IIRC the current range goes something like 80-130ppi).

The main problem is that this is simply too complicated for most people 
(including myself).

In my mind, you're treating monitors as if they were print: you want to say 
exactly how large your font will show up, while the current trend is towards 
user choice (by adjusting monitor resolution, or, in some browsers, by 
adjusting the font size overruling the style sheet)

>What I'm trying to get clear here is that 1 CSS pixel is *not* 1 monitor 
>pixel.

Again, I think this is a regression towards print. Monitor pixels are the 
de-facto standard and more closely conform to the medium. In your scheme the 
user has no control whatsoever over his resolution.

>Monitors are not paper. We should stop trying to treat them like they are. 
>We're painting our creations on canvas borrowed from our audience. We're 
>taking pot luck, not dictating terms.

In my mind, you're treating monitors like paper right now. Paper has a fixed 
size, while monitor size can be adjusted. That's the main difference.

Anyway, this is complex, need to think about it more,

ppk

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