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Discussion (25 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Is there a way to use real pixels? My, admittedly quick, search says no. at least nothing jumps out at me from the spec.
You definitely can't get pure integers though it's always a float even if you use whole numbers. It does eventually get rounded before becoming pixels though.
if the user's operating system is configured to draw pixels at a 1:1 ratio, your pixels will be drawn at a 1:1 ratio. if the user's operating system is configured to draw pixels at a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio, you as a web developer don't get to override that, but you're still addressing pixels directly. if you want to write software that manages the user's hardware directly without giving them options to override it, the web is probably not the right platform for you.
https://drafts.csswg.org/css-values/#absolute-lengths
I guess theoretically a tv could say "this tv will be viewed at 12 feet away so our reference pixel is 1/16 inch" and still be in spec. Which sounds like it has messy implications, Does anyone do this?
Anyway the point being a pixel should fundamentally be a hardware measurement, and if they wanted a "visual angle unit" they should have introduced one.(the moa?) But the last thing we need is a pixel being defined as a hard 1/96 of a inch. which is what we got.
pixels are pixels, and no browser implements them as a fractional-inch measurement. in every actual implementation i'm aware of, they're a hardware based unit.
The problem with different screens having different pixel densities was already present and obvious in 1996.
"Real" pixels are useless if you don't know anything about the screen you're going to render on.
Unfortunately, Retina gave us a nonsensical and hacky “scaling ratio” rather than separate and independent units of physical length, viewing angle, and interaction granularity. (I still can’t get an A4 PDF in GNOME to display at “100%” such that it would actually be 210mm wide on my screen. And Darktable is the only piece of software I know where you can configure ppi and ppd separately.)
So 1ch is defined to be the advance width of "0" (zero), so it's actually telling you something about the current font.
* https://www.w3.org/TR/css-values-4/#font-relative-lengths
Or, have your perhaps selected one of the different themes at the top of the site?
In fact, I think CSS made the wrong decision by proliferating so many things, em, %, px, ch, whatever-else. The human brain is not well-equipped to have so many things for basically the same thing. That's a design flaw in CSS, plain and simple. And the author is thus also wrong. There won't be a mass movement of people using "ch". It would be a good first april article though.