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Death to px, long live ch

shkspr.mobi

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Re: Death to px, long live ch

#81

Post by npn »

atoav wrote: post #80
npn wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what hard is making a fully featured website, with panels no wider than 60ch. typically 60ch equal to 480px (font size 16px), so you need sidebars to the left and the right. which is fine, the holy grail was like that. but if you want to design a layout that look good in all screen resolutions, then a fixed layout does not work. you would have a dozen compromises and layout switches to make it work. at that point, fo…

main should contain the semantic content of the website, you can still make full width headers and footers and have on the side. Well and can be just where the name implies, depending on the screen width. This is really not that hard nowadays. How to do responsive design is no black magic and can be done with only HTML and CSS. You basically just need to wrap (no pun intended) your head around a few basics. Especiall…

? Why are you assuming that I don't know about that.

Actually have you really design practical webapps before? Because your post only have empty pretty words with no substance.

Semantic html tags are just semantic, it is irrelevant for the discussion.

Responsive design is hard, have you ever try to reize your windows and see how your pretty website behaves? Leave aside stupid people thinking you only need to care about phone device (in portrait mode even) and laptop, most people also think 3 or 4 device widths is enough. Sure some smart one already promoted to break the screen by content, not fixed device size, but even that comes with some downsides.

To make a website works decent on all the possible screen sizes is a lot of work, I spent like 4 months updating and fixing my webapp when I first developed it.

Re: Death to px, long live ch

#82

Post by andai »

account42 wrote: post #61
gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Does that mean that one screen pixel was multiple CRT pixels?

Re: Death to px, long live ch

#83

Post by jonhohle »

edent wrote: post #66
SR2Z wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, except 80% of those displays align them as neat little rows and columns. Mobile is really the outlier with odd formations. Nearly everything else is physically identical to the grid conceptual model.

Re: Death to px, long live ch

#84

Post by atoav »

npn wrote: post #81
atoav wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

main should contain the semantic content of the website, you can still make full width headers and footers and have on the side. Well and can be just where the name implies, depending on the screen width. This is really not that hard nowadays. How to do responsive design is no black magic and can be done with only HTML and CSS. You basically just need to wrap (no pun intended) your head around a few basics. Especiall…

? Why are you assuming that I don't know about that. Actually have you really design practical webapps before? Because your post only have empty pretty words with no substance. Semantic html tags are just semantic, it is irrelevant for the discussion. Responsive design is hard, have you ever try to reize your windows and see how your pretty website behaves? Leave aside stupid people thinking you only need to care abo…

Huh, I am sorry my comment seemed to pushed wrong buttons, no need to get all angry here. It appears you projected some emotion or intention into my comment that simply wasn't there. I did not minimize your struggles with my comment.

Granted, out experience level may differ since I read my first book on CSS in ca 2004 as a teenager and have worked with this ever since, so I may have a biased opinion, but come on. That is really no need to become bitter. "See how your pretty website behaves"? Really? Please keep that kind of emotional pettiness out of this website.

I stand by my statement if you have understood CSS it is not hard nowadays to create simple responsive designs. I come from times where you had to center elements in five different ways for all the common browsers out there and true responsiveness was either impossible or required javascript polyfills and weird nesting of (unsemantic) HTML. This is why my sentence about semantic HTML was relevant. Today it is possible to write semantically clean HTML and style it as you need for 99% of the cases. That was not the case in the past for certain designs. Today we do not usually need to create a hundred HTML elements that carry no information and have only relevance for the design. And even if you would need it there are at least ways noe to keep the info relevant for people who have a need for clean semantic HTML, like people with screen readers. Nonetheless, the separation between the roles of HTML and CSS has gotten so much better over the past two decades.

Keep in mind, this discussion tree started out with the discussion whether it is hard to limit text to a width of 60ch. It is not. This can become hard depending on the complexity of your website and the content that mixes with that text (e.g. if you need to break out images that are wider than the text on occasion). But that was not the discussion here. If you have a raw HTML document and you simply need to limit the width of the text body, to a maximum that is dead simple. Any web-browser on any device is capable of displaying a simple HTML page with their browser default template in a way that the user sees the content.

I argued most 90s style layout patterns (e.g. header, navigation on the left, body in the center, footer at the bottom) are not hard to get right, provided you know how to use responsive units and this isn't your first responsive layout. Of course we need to consider how to deal with the width-taking elements on devices that are very narrow (this may require re-arranging or making menus foldable) — that is usually the part that requires the boldest decisions. Other devices like Landscape tablets for example usually don't require a lot of separate work other than adjusting some sizes and ensure the content fits.

If your project is some ultra-flexible thing where the displayed elements are not fixed or predictable, then this can become a hard task, but thst has nothing to so with the CSS and everything with the information it may or may not need to style correctly all at once.

Re: Death to px, long live ch

#86

Post by yencabulator »

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…

Monitors these days provide metadata on their physical size. This laptop screen defines itself as 280x190 mm. Sure, that's not 1:1 with end user distance from screen, but it's a hell of a lot better than switching to mobile layout on my desktop based on how much I zoom my fonts and narrow the window.
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