Typography
Saturday, February 1, 2003[10:02:23 PM]
How to escape pixel-based measures for onscreen type....
Specifying type in pixels is almost meaningless, since the actual *size* varies so dramatically among your customers. A font-size of 13 pixels can seem quite large on some monitors, but unreadably small on other monitors.
Specifying type in an actual measure -- points, inches, millimeters, etc. -- would give you a consistent size across all monitors -- if monitors knew the actual size of their pixels. In fact, there's even more good news, because this approach lets your customers *fudge* for their eyesight. The monitor could actually be set for 96 pixels per inch, but a human could adjust the setting to 120 pixels per inch to make up for poor eyesight.
More pixels per inch could give you better quality type, because more pixels would go into each character. (120 pixels per inch might not be enough to be helpful for 10 point text, alas.)
That takes care of the type. What about the graphics? First, with better type controls, we won't need as many images for navigation and such. Second, we'll be able to use line-art instead of bitmaps. And third, we propose that browsers should incorporate quality bitmap scaling. Where you *do* use a photograph, for example, size it at 120 dpi, and let the browser scale it down to 96 dpi if needed. Browsers can already do this, but they don't necessarily do it well.
In fact, before long, browsers will be able to tell the server what dpi they are using. Then you'll be able to store several sizes on the server, and deliver the best one for each browser.
There are some problems. At low resolutions, a choice of a size in points might not map evenly to an actual pixel size, so the browser would have to round. Current screen resolutions are so low that the shape and color of text can vary dramatically from one pixel size to the next. Verdana is prettier and much easier to read at 11 pixels than at 13 pixels -- regardless of the actual size of 13 pixels. You could also lose the benefit of hinting, I believe.
[10:37:56 AM]
From John Hudson of tiro.com: "I suppose it is inevitable that eventually all web designers will have 200 dpi monitors and will finally realise that specifying type size in pixels was a bad idea. In the meantime, the early adopters will go blind trying to read blogs on their 133+ dpi screens. Being blind, they will find it more difficult to find someone to reproduce with, and so the early adopter gene will gradually be removed from the gene pool. This will leave only late adopters, thereby causing a massive recession in the computer and software industry and slowing the pace of new development to a crawl. People just don't consider the consequences of their design decisions!"
This was a comment at typographi.ca, which is kind of a small-group weblog.
If you think that's amusing, don't miss licentious radio's:
The hundred millionth monkey: "Once upon a time all the web monkeys used tiny type on their web pages. Most used font size=2. The artistic and the long-winded used font size=1. The forward-thinking, standards-compliant web monkeys used stylesheets: font-size: 11px."
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Last update: 9/20/03; 2:57:14 PM.