> It is no more reasonable to re-layout a carefully designed UI then it is to reposition objects and people in a movie scene played on devices of different reso

> It is no more reasonable to re-layout a carefully designed UI then it is to reposition objects and people in a movie scene played on devices of different resolution Is this unreasonable? We don't have the ability to design this kind of responsive control over video streams, but we do have the ability to speed up and slow down videos, embed captions that use native device fonts rather than bake themselves into the video file, adjust contrast and brightness, skip over segments and timestamps, and to adjust audio balance. And many players also have the ability to zoom in and cut off black bars. None of that seems like a problem? I'm regularly thankful for the ability to auto-skip intros and adjust playback speed. Every single video player should have the ability to play at 1.5x speed. I think in general it's important to separate practical design from art. I don't think any user has any obligation to worry about whether or not it's "reasonable" for to adjust an interface in whatever way works best for them. The goal of design is to make it easier to accomplish a task; the designers individual vision doesn't take precedent over that. > Adjusting for that difference is the domain of the operating system and the user. That's exactly why we have semantic units that are tied to a specific meaning/purpose, not ones that just represent abstract concepts like pixel width. The purpose of an `em` unit for widths is to describe the design of a column based on its intended use -- to show X characters in a line. The more specific we are about not just the width of an element, but also the intent behind that width, the easier it is for an OS and a user to adjust for size differences in specific scenarios. If I drop a page to 300 pixels, did I do that because I want the font to be bigger? Am I scaling the entire window down including the font? Do I want the same design and font-size in a single column? Semantic units allow me as a user to communicate the context a page is in, which allows the page to respond to that context. Absolutist design is anti-customization; it imposes the designer's will over the user's will. This matters because even in a single device/platform, it can often be impossible to design a single interface that always works. I use i3wm, so when I open a program it opens in tiled mode. You might get half of the screen, you might get 1/3rd, you might just get the upper left corner. The websites and programs on my computer that are designed responsively handle that, and the ones that aren't, don't. Thankfully, native programs have (slowly) started to get better about things like dropping out of 3-column views when they only have 300 pixels to work with. But the answer to that problem can not be that from now on I'll just open every program in full screen mode so the designer can perfectly position every element. The answer is responsive design, and if that means that a few pixels are out of place when I jam the design into a 328x451 pixel box, then that's fine. I want the interface to work inside the box first, to fulfill its functional requirements, and then to look pretty second.