Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Death to px, long live ch

shkspr.mobi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 86 posts

Re: Death to px, long live ch

#61

Post by account42 »

gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #57
andai wrote: post #48

The article links to https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/11/the-myth-of-the-pixel-perfe... which confuses me, because I definitely remember pixels being visible when I was growing up. I remember the first time I got a 1080p monitor. I felt a visceral terror at the fact that I could no longer see the pixels.

> because I definitely remember pixels being visible when I was growing up Was this on an LCD or CRT display? Because on a CRT, you can't really see the pixels [0] [1], so what you were seeing was probably the shadow mask instead [2]. You could definitely see the pixels on old LCD monitors though, and new LCD monitors too if you look really close, although even big LCD pixels aren't quite as prominent as the shadow m…

You can definitely see pixels on PC monitor CRTs where the shadow mask was much finer than the display resolution. PC monitors were not the same as TVs with nontrivial tech deviations between them.

Re: Death to px, long live ch

#63

Post by account42 »

_matthew_ wrote: post #33
somat wrote: post #10

What 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…

To be honest, I'm quite thankful to whomever decided this. If it were the other way around and everyone used px but it represented true pixels, there's no doubt developers would be incorrectly designing interfaces across the board and websites looking totally off would be a common occurance due to you having an hdpi display or not having one (like what frequently happens with x based apps in Linux). As an aside, tech…

Unfortunately people are designing interfaces incorrectly anyway. Just look at the font size differences between websites from the 90s and today.

Re: Death to px, long live ch

#64

Post by account42 »

krautsauer wrote: post #51
cedilla wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Knowing about the screen also doesn't do you much good if you don't know how far it is going to be away from the viewer. (Yay at fonts rendering with 3 point on my projector because it reports some 6m³ of "screen" area.)

For most use cases yes, but there are some where you could want something on screen to have the same size as a real physical object.

Re: Death to px, long live ch

#65

Post by account42 »

Just leave the viewport size up to the user rather than making assumptions about which widths work best for people you don't know.

Also despite the aggressive title, this article gives basically no reason for why you shouldn't use px.

Re: Death to px, long live ch

#66

Post by edent »

SR2Z wrote: post #44
edent wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've described the exact problem. Sub pixel rendering exploits the fact that most display pixels aren't discrete logical squares. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering

Right, but there's still an addressable set of display units that convert an RGB signal to actual glowing lights, right? It seems like defining px to be perceptual is one of those compatibility hacks that probably helped a ton back in the day, but we have perceptual units and now we're stuck with that baggage. I don't have much of an opinion on this (I use em) but it has taken me by surprise a few times.

> Right, but there's still an addressable set of display units that convert an RGB signal to actual glowing lights, right?

Yes. But those glowing lights aren't little squares in a neat horizontal and vertical rows.

The square pixel is useful in logical contexts - like an SVG or bitmap graphic. But when it is turned into a physical display, those pixels aren't displayed as little squares. The RGB elements are arranged in dozens of different formations depending on the display technology.

Re: Death to px, long live ch

#67

Post by account42 »

toast0 wrote: post #49
jeberle wrote: post #27

I'm still waiting for operating systems to adopt true physical units. You know, that trick PostScript printers have doing since the 80s (running at 300dpi no less). I realize there are large screen projectors in the wild, that's solvable problem. Bitmaps icons are also an issue, but again, solvable.

Real physical units make sense when you're printing on paper. I don't see how they make sense on screens. A one square inch image is fairly large on my phone, not too big on my desktop monitor, and pretty darn small on my tv. That's not to say that pixels make sense to use for layout at those scales either, but before everybody got into high dpi with scaling, it kind of worked... If you were comfortable with tiny tex…

> That's not to say that pixels make sense to use for layout at those scales either, but before everybody got into high dpi with scaling, it kind of worked... If you were comfortable with tiny text, you ran a higher resolution and if you needed things big, you ran a lower resolution.

And even with so-called "dpi" scaling, CSS pixels remain that except users have more options to also have their large TV display finer details.

Re: Death to px, long live ch

#69

Post by penteract »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #54
andai wrote: post #48

The article links to https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/11/the-myth-of-the-pixel-perfe... which confuses me, because I definitely remember pixels being visible when I was growing up. I remember the first time I got a 1080p monitor. I felt a visceral terror at the fact that I could no longer see the pixels.

Yeah, you can see square-looking pixels on most screens if you display something with sharp aliasing. "There is no universal grid" is good to understand, but there are device-specific grids all over the place. And all the examples that are ultra zoomed and/or showing antialiased font rendering obscure the pixels that are more visible in other situations. That 0.01 to 0.04 degree range later in the article is big enou…

It never says 0.04 degrees, just 0.04mm (corresponding to about 0.015 degrees at the stated 15cm distance).
Post reply on HN