Layout shift when the font loads
Not necessarily. See https://screenspan.net/fallback
Death to px, long live ch
11–20 of 86 posts
Re: Death to px, long live ch
#12What I want to know is who decided to break px, the last thing we need is yet another screwball physical measurement, css was already full of them. But what "tut tut, everybody is using px and these new hi-dpi displays are rendering things really tiny, we can't have that" and now px as a useful unit is ruined. Is there a way to use real pixels? My, admittedly quick, search says no. at least nothing jumps out at me fr…
px is still a useful unit. the user's operating system applying a scaling fator doesn't make it not useful.
if the user's operating system is configured to draw pixels at a 1:1 ratio, your pixels will be drawn at a 1:1 ratio. if the user's operating system is configured to draw pixels at a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio, you as a web developer don't get to override that, but you're still addressing pixels directly. if you want to write software that manages the user's hardware directly without giving them options to override it, the web is probably not the right platform for you.
Re: Death to px, long live ch
#13I will not take CSS advice from a website that looks like such utter crap on mobile
Re: Death to px, long live ch
#14What I want to know is who decided to break px, the last thing we need is yet another screwball physical measurement, css was already full of them. But what "tut tut, everybody is using px and these new hi-dpi displays are rendering things really tiny, we can't have that" and now px as a useful unit is ruined. Is there a way to use real pixels? My, admittedly quick, search says no. at least nothing jumps out at me fr…
You could set the CSS zoom property to 1/window.devicePixelRatio with JavaScript but I think you can't do it with CSS only. If you do that then px is physical px. This doesn't include browser zoom though or mobile pinch to zoom. You could also get those with JavaScript but then people would be really confused by the behavior of your website.
You definitely can't get pure integers though it's always a float even if you use whole numbers. It does eventually get rounded before becoming pixels though.
Re: Death to px, long live ch
#15What I want to know is who decided to break px, the last thing we need is yet another screwball physical measurement, css was already full of them. But what "tut tut, everybody is using px and these new hi-dpi displays are rendering things really tiny, we can't have that" and now px as a useful unit is ruined. Is there a way to use real pixels? My, admittedly quick, search says no. at least nothing jumps out at me fr…
No one decided to break it, it was 1/96th of an inch from the beginning.
The problem with different screens having different pixel densities was already present and obvious in 1996.
"Real" pixels are useless if you don't know anything about the screen you're going to render on.
Re: Death to px, long live ch
#16What happened to em?
That's what I wondered. I found the spec*. I'd vaguely thought that 1em was the width of "M" but apparently it's just the font-size, and the connection between font-size and the actual size of the text is very font dependent.
So 1ch is defined to be the advance width of "0" (zero), so it's actually telling you something about the current font.
Re: Death to px, long live ch
#17What I want to know is who decided to break px, the last thing we need is yet another screwball physical measurement, css was already full of them. But what "tut tut, everybody is using px and these new hi-dpi displays are rendering things really tiny, we can't have that" and now px as a useful unit is ruined. Is there a way to use real pixels? My, admittedly quick, search says no. at least nothing jumps out at me fr…
No one decided to break it, it was 1/96th of an inch from the beginning. The problem with different screens having different pixel densities was already present and obvious in 1996. "Real" pixels are useless if you don't know anything about the screen you're going to render on.
Correction: in CSS1, from December 1996, a pixel was defined slightly differently, which works out to 1/90th of an inch.
Re: Death to px, long live ch
#18content-driven websites that aim to be responsive and accessible should use as little size-related styling as possible. fr for containers and rem/em for text.
Re: Death to px, long live ch
#19What I want to know is who decided to break px, the last thing we need is yet another screwball physical measurement, css was already full of them. But what "tut tut, everybody is using px and these new hi-dpi displays are rendering things really tiny, we can't have that" and now px as a useful unit is ruined. Is there a way to use real pixels? My, admittedly quick, search says no. at least nothing jumps out at me fr…
No one decided to break it, it was 1/96th of an inch from the beginning. The problem with different screens having different pixel densities was already present and obvious in 1996. "Real" pixels are useless if you don't know anything about the screen you're going to render on.
It was around 1/96" on a conventional PC screen because that was the conventional pixel density for PC screens; it was 1/72" (i.e. 1pt) on a conventional Mac screen for the same reason. That was something to deal with already in the GIFs-in-tables era and remained one as we moved on to CSS, right until Retina happened.
Unfortunately, Retina gave us a nonsensical and hacky “scaling ratio” rather than separate and independent units of physical length, viewing angle, and interaction granularity. (I still can’t get an A4 PDF in GNOME to display at “100%” such that it would actually be 210mm wide on my screen. And Darktable is the only piece of software I know where you can configure ppi and ppd separately.)
Re: Death to px, long live ch
#20What I want to know is who decided to break px, the last thing we need is yet another screwball physical measurement, css was already full of them. But what "tut tut, everybody is using px and these new hi-dpi displays are rendering things really tiny, we can't have that" and now px as a useful unit is ruined. Is there a way to use real pixels? My, admittedly quick, search says no. at least nothing jumps out at me fr…
px is still a useful unit. the user's operating system applying a scaling fator doesn't make it not useful. if the user's operating system is configured to draw pixels at a 1:1 ratio, your pixels will be drawn at a 1:1 ratio. if the user's operating system is configured to draw pixels at a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio, you as a web developer don't get to override that, but you're still addressing pixels directly. if you want to…
The spec fafs around a bit talking about how the px is a "visual angle unit" But I am unable to form an interpretation where the "reference pixel" is anything other than 1/96 inch.
https://drafts.csswg.org/css-values/#absolute-lengths
I guess theoretically a tv could say "this tv will be viewed at 12 feet away so our reference pixel is 1/16 inch" and still be in spec. Which sounds like it has messy implications, Does anyone do this?
Anyway the point being a pixel should fundamentally be a hardware measurement, and if they wanted a "visual angle unit" they should have introduced one.(the moa?) But the last thing we need is a pixel being defined as a hard 1/96 of a inch. which is what we got.