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Retina display supportRetina display supportPosted Jan 9, 2013 15:02 UTC (Wed) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402)In reply to: Retina display support by roc Parent article: Firefox 18 is now available
"CSS pixels haven't reliably corresponded to screen pixels for quite some time now."
Depends what you mean by reliably. I'd say it's a good 90% of the time people aren't zooming or using a mobile browser and they do correspond. And in a world where nearly half of visitors use IE so nothing really works properly anyway, I call that relatively reliable.
I'm just quite depressed by the whole way "retina" has been handled by everyone. There have been many efforts at resolution independence over the last ten years - now when significantly different resolution devices come into the market all that seems to have been thrown out the window and everyone seems to need to go round adding "retina"-specific hacks, "retina"-specific icons and whatnot to everything under the sun.
"We've found ways to avoid almost all problems when zooming Web pages."
As a web developer I look at that statement with eyebrows askew.
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Retina display support Posted Jan 9, 2013 15:40 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
There really were not any serious attempts at resolution independence earlier. Most of available displays had DPI in range of 96-140 and that allowed to simply ignore occasional problems.
Retina displays allow no such slack. So everyone suddenly realized that their code is not actually that resolution independent and they have to do something about it.
Retina display support Posted Jan 9, 2013 18:59 UTC (Wed) by redden0t8 (guest, #72783) [Link]
I'm not really sure what you mean by Retina-specific hacks. As a notebook Retina-display user, I can say in 6 months of daily browsing, I have yet to find a website that doesn't render correctly.
The browser still lays things out identically, it just renders extra pixels for text+vector graphics, and anti-aliases raster images. That's the whole reason why it's implemented using a pixel-ratio. Everything automatically works.
Coding webpages in real units is impractical anyways, as you don't know the device it'll be displayed on. No one on a phone wants a webpage to be initially zoomed to be 10 inches wide when their screen is only 2-3 inches wide. The first thing they'll do is zoom out to figure out where to scroll to before zooming back in. Same idea for a tablet. Laptops/desktops are a little easier, but you still don't know the size of the display (9" netbook or 30" desktop?), how far away the user is sitting (HTPC or netbook?), and how good their eyesight is. Ultimately, it's up to the device-maker and end user.
All the web-developer needs is a reference unit. The "pixel", while poorly named, already provides this. Each device maker can decide how to handle the scaling ratio for a given form-factor. Ideally one day, once desktop OS's are truly resolution independent, they'll let end-users pick their "ideal" ratio with a slider somewhere that affects the entire UI.
Yes you'll need to start serving up higher resolution images soon or later, but this is caused by hi-dpi displays in general and not just Retina(TM) displays. It's already possible to query the device pixel ratio in a browser-independent way, or alternately blindly serve up high-res images to everyone.
Retina display support Posted Jan 9, 2013 20:09 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
HTML actually has an abstract 'em' unit which is linked to the text size.
I've actually long wished that we had some kind of 'pixels' with fixed angular size. But I kinda doubt that most web-developers would like to work with steradians :)
Retina display support Posted Jan 9, 2013 21:41 UTC (Wed) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]
CSS pixels are exactly "some kind of 'pixels' with fixed angular size".
Retina display support Posted Jan 9, 2013 21:59 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Then we lose ability to use sub-pixel positioning (last time I checked you can't use fractional pixels).
That's not a problem right now, since browser does all the drawing. But once we move into the brave new Canvas world, we'll start to get this kinds of problems. 1 pixel on a Retina display might be below eye's resolution, but 1px misalignment is easily noticeable.
Retina display support Posted Jan 10, 2013 10:35 UTC (Thu) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]
You absolutely can use fractional CSS pixels.
Retina display support Posted Jan 11, 2013 10:02 UTC (Fri) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]
Speaking of resolution-independence, I remember being excited about promises made by KDE people regarding resolution-independent desktop in KDE4 - things like vector icons and such. I don't think I'm seeing it in the final result. On my work laptop I had to increase font sizes in the GUI and now it looks somewhat out of place, like Frankenstein's monster living in a doll house. I suspect I'm missing something here...
Retina display support Posted Jan 13, 2013 11:01 UTC (Sun) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
i guess it turned out to be harder than expected. The Oxygen style can scale only partially and while there are vector icons (and a high resolution Oxygen icon set), you simply cant make one icon which.looks good in all sizes. Note that retina in the way apple did it it, as far as i know at least, isn't resolution independent either - it is mostly just a doubling of the resolution of everything. Having a scaling of 125% for example is much harder, let alone arbitrary %s.
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