In typography, the point is the smallest unit of measure. It is used for measuring font size, leading, and other items on a printed page. The size of the point has varied throughout the history of printing. Since the 18th century, the point's size has varied from 0.18 to 0.4 millimeters. Following the advent of desktop publishing in the 1980s and 1990s, digital printing has largely supplanted the letterpress printing and has established the DTP point (DeskTop Publishing point) as the de facto standard. The DTP point is defined as 1⁄72 of an international inch (about 0.353 mm)
So if you have a 72 dpi monitor, then as it happens, a point is a pixel.
In the first case the amount of mm would be different for each display. In the second case the amount of pixels would be different for each display.
Perhaps this quote from the article provides a hint:
> Ok, I get the even number thing, but seriously, why not 6, or 10? The majority of popular screen sizes are divisible by 8 which makes for an easy fit.
From this I'd say it is about pixels. But why call it "pt" then? And yes, how does this give useful results on high resolution displays?
I think the article is really confusing.
The point is that the author says that the screen size in pixels should be an integer multiple of 8pt, which doesn't make sense.