Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: IE 5 for Macintosh
Author: Nicholas Riley Posted: 3/27/2000; 9:09:28 PM Topic: IE 5 for Macintosh Msg #: 15743 (In response to 15742) Prev/Next: 15742 / 15744
If the root problem is that the screen is 72 DPI, or more plainly, pixels per inch, and that windows is 92 DPI, how is specifying anything in pixels vs. points going to solve the problem?It's unlikely that most Mac users' screens display exactly 72 dpi, or that the Windows display is 96 dpi. Even on windowing systems (Windows, X) which allow you to change the dpi to match the screen image, most users don't; they just stick with the defaults. People specify font sizes on Windows relative to the insanely large 12 point/16 pixel default (which would be 16 point on the Mac) because otherwise their web pages look ugly; this comes out too small on the Mac. This was pre-CSS; now, there are better solutions.
Specifying height in pixels will give a consistent font size (in terms of pixel height) regardless of screen resolution. This means reasonable display by default on both Windows and Mac. If people have a 14" monitor at 1280x1024 and a 72 dpi setting and want to make it bigger, then they can use browser features like the "text zoom" on IE 5 for Mac, or even browsers like Opera that will zoom the entire page including graphics. I just tested, both techniques successfully enlarge the size of text specified by CSS pixel heights.
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