Next in Browser Development, High DPI Websites? 447
Joost de Valk writes "In a post at the WebKit blog, Dave Hyatt raises interesting points about the future of web development and browsers. He says, that with screens getting more and more pixels, it is imperative website design takes the next step: High DPI Website rendering. This could mean that a CSS pixel (px) is rendered as a 2x2 pixelblock. In the article he also mentions WebKit will be providing possibilities to use SVG for all kinds of purposes, like backgrounds. He calls upon other browser developers to take part in the discussion so that 'concrete standards in this area can be hammered out.'"
Please no... (Score:2, Insightful)
I run at a high resolution so I can fit more on the screen, not make it more detailed.
1600x1200 is not a high-def 800x600!
Geez...
Wait... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Please no... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody's forcing you to look at a website in high DPI, they're just enabling you to do so.
-:sigma.SB
hammer out standards? (Score:0, Insightful)
Bad idea in so many ways (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just a bad idea. Not only is this not going through the W3C as it should to be standardized, but many sites do pixel positioning to have ultimate control over their design. This could throw that out of wack (it looks like this only affects CSS and not pictures/spacers some developers use). Also, I can guarentee you if this is standardized, it'll be like Microsoft's Alpha-Transparent PNG support... it'll come... eventually...
Compatible (Score:5, Insightful)
Even today I have to tweak valid code to make all the browsers see it the same.
Get the basics right first, like float, tranparency, opacity etc then add to it with whatever is needed.
Re:Please no... (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody's forcing you to look at a website in high DPI, they're just enabling you to do so.
I get the feeling it's just another way to screw up a webpage.
Re:Please no... (Score:5, Insightful)
That part is talking about YOU.
The full solution to this problem therefore is to allow your user interface to scale, with the scale factor being configurable by the user. This means that Web content has to be zoomable, with the entire page properly scaling based off the magnification chosen by the user.
This part is talking about ME. People with high DPI and not so great vision would like to be able to scale pages. If you RTFM you'd see that it's optional and he's suggested SVG
Sounds damn good to me!
A couple of things... (Score:3, Insightful)
The web will render text just fine for people who set their screen's dpi correctly. Gone are the days of 72px (96 for Macs) == 1 physical inch on a screen. It's just the images and backgrounds (or anything else with fixed dimensions) that won't scale with the text.
While I agree to a point (being able to cram SVG into everywhere it could possibly work will be awesome), any hi-def web design will take a back seat while the next generation standard is decided upon... I vote XHTML2 over HTML5.
Small Screens (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bad idea in so many ways (Score:5, Insightful)
That approach is already broken; when the user overrides font and font sie with their own (a perfectly legitimate thing to do) this easily ends up looking like garbage. IF you want "ultimate control over your design", publish a PDF.
Fortunately, and unlike your assertion, most sites do not do this, and adapt quite well already. In fact, quite a lot of sites (nytimes.com, for example) look distincty better once you overrride their font choices.
First, the OS probably needs to support it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't like my browser maximized! (Score:2, Insightful)
gets it half-right (Score:4, Insightful)
Scaling is the right approach, but it's the user (*not* the developer) who should be in control. No one else has any right (or even ability) to set pixel sizes on my display. Am I 320x200 or 1920x1440? 3" handheld or 27" plasma? How far from the monitor am I? How many arcseconds per pixel? How good is my eyesight? What colors and contrast levels do I prefer? What font faces am I most comfortable with? If you don't know for absolute sure, then stay the hell out of my settings.
Any page that says "designed for resolution X" is done by a hack. Current web designs scale ok if you stay away from absolute units. Scaling images properly is a royal pain in the ass. But turning browsers into pixel-perfect rendering devices (even by translating CSS pixels into real pixels) is not the answer. Pixel units should be abolished from the CSS spec (along with points, picas, inches, and cm). Everything should be done with em/ex. Just adding rounded corners to CSS would make a lot of image scaling problems disappear. SVG can pick up the slack.
The web is an information exchange conduit, not a graphic design medium.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Device (in)dependent units (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hold yer horses (Score:5, Insightful)
Article "doesn't get it"... (Score:3, Insightful)
The browser determines how HTML is rendered.
And that pretty much sums it up. This is not a web standard that has to be introduced on a element level within a page - that would be useless as you want to upscale the whole thing. This is a browser rendering issue pure and simple, and can be handled however the browser writers see fit.
However, before thinking about upsclaing, they need to think about a few 'related' issues:
The web is for all media (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever since the seperation of style and content via CSS, the web has been moving much faster towards the goal of being equally well rendered in every medium [w3.org]. This is why you should measure fonts in ems rather than pixels, and measure other elements in percentages or ems. That way, your site will look just as good on a projector as it will on a mobile phone. With a move to liquid layouts and SVG, and a lack of references to pixels, the devices the webpage will be rendered on should become completely irrelevant to web developers.
2x2 pixels? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Please no... (Score:2, Insightful)
I've had the joy of working with a 10" 1920x1080 widescreen LCD; with the applications appropriately designed and configured for it, text becomes much clearer and easier to read. Images had to be scaled up to make them viewable, but the experience still converted me to the idea that high DPI is good.
Fools (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, this is your first mistake. When you design a web site for a particular resolution you're guaranteed that it will display undesirably on more than 50% of your visitors' screens. Even if my screen is exactly your projected size there is a very good chance I'll be annoyed by having to resize my browser.
In fact, if I have to make my browser window any other size than the one I've set it to in order for your web site to be useful then you've already pissed me off. I'm the customer. You don't want to piss me off.
Its not like this wasn't understood from the first days of NCSA Mosaic nearly 15 years ago. That's why the original specs for html intentionally offered no way to specify pixel placement.
Re:Opera Zoom (Score:3, Insightful)
Some images obviously still come out looking rough. I use it to show our graphics designer why we shouldn't make fonts out of graphics. She still thinks it's worth it for some reason.
Opera is not light years ahead. Like Firefox and IE it has its limitations. So far, I've yet to find one from Firefox that I can't work around easily. My pet peeve with IE is that option elements don't send or recieve their own events - only their parent select boxes can do that. I really wish they did, because I'd like to make a combo box into a thing that you can use to reorder elements, and it can't be done without that.
My pet peeve with Opera is far worse - iframes are always on the top layer (so you can't have, for example, a menu system in one IFrame that shows the menu that runs into another). The "standards" don't matter - only those standards met by other browsers are real standards that need to be met. The fact that Opera doesn't meet this standard means that I either have to design sites differently, or not support Opera.
Where I work we do the latter because Opera's marketshare is so little.
A designer's perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
What this means is that we designers are very concerned about proportions and the size/scale relationship between type on the page and graphics on the page.
Given this statement, the existing option of using relative sized type that will scale relative to other type on the page and maintain that relationship... is only half of the equation.... the compositional layout still ends up broken, ie: the important graphic on the page no longer has the hierarchical and visual importance it was supposed to have in the design because all the text on the page is suddenly 2X bigger and the visual combination of text and graphic no longer communicates the message effectively and has become a cramped, chunky, messy version of what it was intended to be.
This explanation is why a designer may choose to use pixel sizes for a particular layout instead of using relative sizes.
Additionally, a designer would modify a compositional layout of the same content, given the option, if there are two or more set dimensional targets... simply because each dimensional size may have a optimal layout to best communicate the message, ie: a landscape design compared to a portrait design or better yet a letter page sized design compared to a magazine page design.... and this is due to the fact that there is more space available and a different balance of space and content is required, which means different margins, different graphic sizes, etc, etc... but not simply a scaled up version.
An analogy for the uber geek would be to think in terms of physics and nature.... the bumblebee, we all know that the bumblebee at any other scale would not be able to fly with it's current proportions of wing/body/mass... basically a given design won't always continue to work if you simply scale it up proportionally.
To sum up, any tools that will allow us to more effectively do our job of communicating will get our support. This doesn't mean the tools won't be abused by some, in fact some designers will take it as a challenge to abuse the tool to the extreme and will simply call this 'cutting edge' design, even though the more experienced designers will look at it and call it 'cutting room floor' design.
So flame on about standards and liquid designs, just know that until the standards and technology accomodate good visual design practice and methodology (which has been around a lot longer and has a much more mature heritage, more research done and more results in real use) then designers will continue to ignore them when they get in the way.
You're missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Graphics could likewise be scaled.
Yes, they can--but scaled graphics will never look as good as higher-resolution source graphics. The entire point of what he's talking about is enabling web developers to have pages with images that look fantastic when scaled up, rather than looking like a page with small images that have been automatically scaled by the OS/browser.
Re:A designer's perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
If that's what you read then read it again. I said that fixed proportions are often essential for communicating a message which combines graphic and textual elements and that designers will prefer using pixel sizes on the web until an alternative method is adopted.. one which allows both graphic and textual elements to scale proportionally together. The current alternative is to make the text part of the graphic... which is an option at times but not one that is preferred over using real text if at all possible.
Ask someone who is forced to read a website at 200% type size while the rest of the layout stays the same.... certainly they appreciate the fact that they can at least read the text but they will tell you that it would be better if they could also make out the details in the photograph or illustration which accompanies the text and is referenced by the text. Additionally they would prefer to have an experience which closely resembles that which other people get, not some compromise of usability versus design.
Websites aren't meant to be compatible with a small screen.... instead I would use an RSS feed or completely different set of content more suitable and more useful to that viewer segment.
I certainly don't have to cater to every whim of the end-user.... you want to look at Flickr on Lynx... sorry, that's just dumb, so I wouldn't provide a facility that would give you a bad experience and would rather tell you to use an appropriate device for viewing the content. Likewise if you'd like to drive your car into a lake and expect it to float, your car manufacturer will tell you to buy a boat instead.. your experience will be much better even though driving into the lake is 'supported' by your vehicle.
Re:A designer's perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
Many comments were denouncing this capability as something that should be left up to the browser to do or the OS to do.
Yet without some way to specify images which can be scaled, in a way that doesn't degrade their quality, ie: SVG or PNGs with multiple resolutions, or simply a CSS declaration that provides for two or more images with differing quality... then the user experience is going to degrade as well... like when a person prints a web page to a high resolution printer... you get 72 dpi images, grainy, chunky, jpeg artifacts all over, etc.
What the article is saying and what I am inferring, is that with this new facility both problems can be solved.. that of providing a user with larger text and maintaining the proportions of the design by additionally scaling the images, without losing fidelity.
Companies have more than just the direct consumer to address... they have investors, site reviewers, partners, etc. whom will not accept a lower level of design and probably will never even use the site themselves.... they care about image and brand awareness.
Often a commerce store will take 85% of it's orders over the phone regardless of the usability of it's online store.... simply because people want to ask a question about a product that is not available online or even on product packaging in a offline store... customer service. They won't make that phone call if it looks like the company doesn't care, ie they've put up a site which looks thrown together even if it is very usable.
In any case, this type of web innovation can only benefit everyone.... would you really prefer that we web designers/developers go back to html 3, using CGI and perl for everything? That a store front be a list of products with prices and a buy button? Hmmm maybe you would, good luck with that... why not simply order from a price list over the phone.