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Pixels

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Re: Pixels

#2
If 1 pt = 0.75 pixels, then there is no meaningful distinction between the measurements. It's a scale factor. It's like advocating for mm over cm. I don't quite understand the point of the article.

If he's worried about terminology, then redefine the word pixel as being 4/3 of a pt. Problem solved.

Also, either his last sentence is a mistake, or I must have misunderstood the entire article.

Re: Pixels

#3
I'm pretty sure that this is wrong. A css pixel is a screen pixel as long as the screen dpi is reasonably close to 96dpi. Certainly 1px borders on my MBA are always 1px, not a blurry px and a half.

The correspondence between pixels and screen pixels break down when the dpi is nuts, which is why 1 px (css) = 2px (screen) on the retina screen of the iPhone 4.

You can't avoid pixels in CSS. Yet.

Re: Pixels

#4
post #2

If 1 pt = 0.75 pixels, then there is no meaningful distinction between the measurements. It's a scale factor. It's like advocating for mm over cm. I don't quite understand the point of the article. If he's worried about terminology, then redefine the word pixel as being 4/3 of a pt. Problem solved. Also, either his last sentence is a mistake, or I must have misunderstood the entire article.

For those too lazy to click through to the article, the author says that neither pt nor px are relative units, and then drops a bewildering bomb: "I’m saying is when you need an absolute measure you’ll want to define it in pixels." I'm assuming the last sentence must be a typo, because his entire piece (poorly) advocates using pt rather than px.

Re: Pixels

#5
post #2

If 1 pt = 0.75 pixels, then there is no meaningful distinction between the measurements. It's a scale factor. It's like advocating for mm over cm. I don't quite understand the point of the article. If he's worried about terminology, then redefine the word pixel as being 4/3 of a pt. Problem solved. Also, either his last sentence is a mistake, or I must have misunderstood the entire article.

Yeah, either I'm missing something big in his post, or he is really confused about what's he's discussing.

Re: Pixels

#6
post #2

If 1 pt = 0.75 pixels, then there is no meaningful distinction between the measurements. It's a scale factor. It's like advocating for mm over cm. I don't quite understand the point of the article. If he's worried about terminology, then redefine the word pixel as being 4/3 of a pt. Problem solved. Also, either his last sentence is a mistake, or I must have misunderstood the entire article.

I totally agree.

As someone who is a programmer, not a designer my reaction to reading this is:

"What is this I don't even...."

I figured he was going to be advocating moving to a relative system where the rendering engine was made aware of the dpi of the display and vector graphics (or differently sized bitmaps as in the Android ldpi/mdpi/hdpi model) were used where possible, because we very clearly have to start embracing that model as the dpi and size of devices is beginning to be wildly divergent in all directions... but what he's actually suggesting is basically meaningless, IMO.

Re: Pixels

#7
post #2

If 1 pt = 0.75 pixels, then there is no meaningful distinction between the measurements. It's a scale factor. It's like advocating for mm over cm. I don't quite understand the point of the article. If he's worried about terminology, then redefine the word pixel as being 4/3 of a pt. Problem solved. Also, either his last sentence is a mistake, or I must have misunderstood the entire article.

[deleted]

Re: Pixels

#9
perhaps if he'd offered to go with em's and to just roll with keeping the design of a page relative to the font size I could understand.

But the easiest way to understand why everyone still uses px, is because when you've got a design created beforehand it'd take an awful lot of work to make it exact using relative sizes.

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