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But pixels are a lie! Pixels are being scaled all over the place these days, up to 300-400%. The only reason pixels appear to "work" is that everyone uses pix
by zlynx 9y ago
But pixels are a lie!
Pixels are being scaled all over the place these days, up to 300-400%.
The only reason pixels appear to "work" is that everyone uses pixels, so the software has to be written to lie about pixels. And so they continue to seem to work and people continue to use them to size things.
They might as well just call them "screen fractions" or something, because they sure aren't pixels.
- thomastjeffery 9y agoYou are confusing pixels with points. Points are being scaled, and a simple workaround to accomplish that is often duplication of pixels.
- cbhl 9y agoOn HiDPI mobile devices, pixels aren't real pixels. They're actually treated like points -- a pixel in CSS ends up being something like 3-ish real device pixels, plus or minus, depending on the device.
- c-smile 9y agoWindows: pixels are pixels. Some systems there (e.g. WPF) use also dip units (Device Independent Pixel, 1/96in == 1px in twisted CSS terms). And that's how it should be done in CSS form the very beginning. MacOS/iOS uses screen units. Each such unit is of N physical pixels. Where N is a number obtained by [ nsscreen backingScaleFactor] function for particular screen (monitor).
- thomastjeffery 9y ago> Device Independent Pixel, 1/96in == 1px That's a point. 12pt font means 12 points.
- int_19h 9y agoA point is 1/72". A dip is 1/96".
- 6nf 9y agoEven points are a lie now. I open a PDF on my computer, and the PDF viewer might scale it to fit the window, and the OS might scale it based on my preferences, and maybe my monitor is a projector which means the OS has no idea how big the viewing area actually is.
- bshacklett 9y agoThey're not necessarily true pixels anymore, but the effect of using px as the unit of measurement hasn't really changed. You're controlling more physical pixels, but a similar size of the screen.
- lstamour 9y agoActually, the W3C calls it a "reference pixel": https://www.w3.org/TR/css-values-3/#reference-pixel https://www.w3.org/TR/css-values-3/#reference-pixel -- other units: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-values-3/#lengths https://www.w3.org/TR/css-values-3/#lengths