Specifying sensible device types to use an application on in the desktop file

[jtojnar at gmail.com]

On Mon, 2020-10-12 at 10:29 +0200, Marco Martin wrote:
> One thing I like about the "naive" approach of just specifying
> "phone"
> "desktop" "tv" and so on is that the term comes in with the
> assumption
> of a default configuration of screen size, input and viewing
> distance,
> so a tv would be big screen, big fonts and far away viewing distance,
> remote control. A desktop: medium size, high dpi, small fonts,
> keyboard and a pointing device and so on.
> "Modifiers" would be necessary.. I would expect a 20" tv to show
> things a bit different than a 50" one, or indeed, a desktop with
> bigger than normal scaling for accessibility reasons.

We might also want to check prior art. Web used to have handheld,
projection and tv media types but they have been deprecated in Media
Queries 4.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Media_Queries/Using_media_queries#Media_types

Some reasoning is provided in the specification:

https://drafts.csswg.org/mediaqueries/#media-types