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Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who is using 12 px font in body text should be butchered imho. For reference 12 pt is approx 17 pixels in 100 PPI, and I think that even it is bit small for body text in web.

Also, desktop display tech needs to advance. But meanwhile, yes, please test your font selections with different software and preferably hardware, and ensure that it stays readable. I think all these new tech allowing fancy typefaces has produced at least twice as many horribly unreadable sites than those it has improved.

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Agreed. There's a reason Safari's "Reader" feature displays body text as 18px.

I find myself using Reader and/or hitting Cmd+Plus on far too many sites these days.

HN is 12px font for me, I think that's the Chrome default. Looks fine to me.

Actually its 10 points (at least so it's defined in the CSS). But I wouldn't like to read any longer passages in this font size, and sometimes I zoom in even here to read more comfortably. But 12pt seems actually quite comfortable now that I tried it, so the part about it being too small can be redacted.

But the main point was that I strongly disagree defining font sizes in pixels. What happens when somebody with 250 PPI display comes along and that 12 px font suddenly is 3.5 points?

Note that a px is not the same thing as a pixel. On a 250 PPI display 1 px probably equals 2 pixels.

http://webkit.org/blog/55/high-dpi-web-sites/

This just makes me angry. The whole point of being able to specify in px was to have something that is actually specific to the device's pixels---otherwise you'd use points or inches or cm---for those rare instances where the pixel count is actually relevant. Of course, it got overused, but the answer should not be to just redefine "pixel" as "something a bit smaller than a point" (except in a bit more detail)! Argh.

Actually, rescaling pixels is part of the CSS specification:

     If the pixel density of the output device is very 
     different from that of a typical computer display, the 
     user agent should rescale pixel values. [...]
     It is recommended that the reference pixel be [...] one 
     pixel on a device with a pixel density of 96dpi

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#length-units

I may be reading it wrong, but it sounds like a px is a pixel—until you zoom in. If you define a web page’s default font size as 12px, and it stayed at that no matter how much you zoomed in, it wouldn’t be much of a zoom feature, would it?

That would be reasonable, but the CSS standard says:

"If the pixel density of the output device is very different from that of a typical computer display, the user agent should rescale pixel values."

It then goes on to define a "reference pixel" in terms of arclength subtended within the user's field of vision. On reflection, I suppose this is sufficiently different from pt/in/cm (which measure absolute length) to merit its own separate measure; I just wish they hadn't used the term "pixel" for it. Because "pixel" already means something else and the arclength subtended by a pixel in a "typical computer display" has changed considerably over the last twenty years.

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