Resolution indpendence

[Glynn Clements]

Felix Miata wrote:

> AFAICT, the technology exists for displays to be double or more the
> resolution the average user has now, but the systems they're expected to be
> used with are dependent on anachronisms like 96 DPI, choices between two tiny
> bitmap icon size groups, and apps designed as if they were intended for print
> media of fixed dimension instead of computer display screens of widely
> varying size and resolution. Few would now buy those much higher resolutions
> due to the tininess of objects that would result from their use encumbered by
> those legacies. If the desktops could accommodate the same resolution laser
> printers started with (300 or more), the increments would be too small to
> matter, and scaling would bother few, or maybe no one.

Once you get up to double the size, you can get around the problems
quite easily, i.e. anything that isn't inherently scalable can just be
scaled by 2:1.

The problem is at the intermediate level, i.e. what you do with a 125
dpi monitor when everything is designed for 92 dpi. 125 dpi is still
low enough that rasterised vectors (outline fonts, SVG icons) are a
poor substitute for hand-crafted bitmaps, and scaling by
one-point-something factors is even worse.

> > So long as display resolutions remain low enough that you have UI
> > elements which are only a few pixels in size, the fact that you
> > ultimately have to rasterise whole pixels means that you can't just
> > operate entirely in physical units, in the same way that you can with
> > a 300+dpi laser printer.
> 
> Right, so desktop environments need to make some big changes to permit
> display devices with enough resolution to be feasible. So, this thread isn't
> so much about whether people know the conflicts exist so much as it is the
> posture of those trying to make the best of what is vs. those trying to push
> capabilities up to a reasonable ought-to-be. I doubt anyone would complain if
> the average was 300. The problems are many in dealing with the gap between
> current reality and goodness, how to eliminate that gap, and living with and
> minimizing the pain of the under construction mess in the meantime.

Exactly. Displays are at the point where the limiting factor is often
physical size rather than pixel size, but it's going to be a while
before we get to the point that the limiting factor will *always* be
physical size.

In the meantime, trying to operate in fixed sizes is going to cause
problems. Fixed pixel sizes will result in elements which are
physically too small on high-resolution displays. Operating in fixed
physical sizes will result in elements which are too crudely rendered
on low-resolution displays.

Doing something in between is going to require some sophistication
from toolkits and applications, e.g. "negotiating" dimensions rather
than pulling a number from somewhere and treating it as an absolute.

> > Well, you *can*, but the artifacts are going to look a lot worse.
> 
> Maybe to people with your 15/15 vision,

Or to people who buy low-end computers and only replace them once per
decade. Don't underestimate the size of that population. Also, bear in
mind that monitors tend to get replaced less often than computers; my
"spare" monitor (17", 1280x1024) was bought in 1995, and still works.

IOW, what is "current" isn't reflected by what's leaving the stores so
much as by what's going into the trash. Now, if you're a commercial
vendor, there may be rewards available for forcing people to discard
functional hardware prematurely. I don't see how that applies to us,
though.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>