On Wed, 2016-10-26 at 08:30 +0200, nicolas.mail...@laposte.net wrote:
> But, GTK core maintainers have always insisted those didn't exist
> (just like they insisted on hardcoding 96 dpi, on the eve of Apple
> showing the world it was arbitrary and obsolete).

...by releasing displays carefully tuned to look best at a precise
integer multiple of 96dpi? Not really great support for your theory.

Sure, it's arbitrary. Arbitrary doesn't necessarily mean 'bad'. The
96dpi consensus worked perfectly well: hardware manufacturers knew what
sizes and resolutions to make their monitors, and font designers (and
UI designers) knew that when they had to make a tricky decision about
how to tweak something, they should favour whatever choice makes it
look good at 96dpi. Which is really important when you're designing
something as finicky at a font, at a resolution as low as 96dpi; the
question of which point size you choose as the cutoff for rendering a
simple line as 1 pixel wide or 2 pixels wide is extremely important,
for e.g.

I used to go for the the 'everything should be perfectly resolution
independent!' argument, because it seems intellectually satisfying from
some sort of theoretical engineering point of view, but I find the
argument that it's not really the most *practical* way to do things
pretty convincing.

Even now, the consensus mostly survives; most hardware is designed to
work best at 96dpi or an integer multiple thereof. Awkward things like
13" 1080p displays are still in a distinct minority.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net
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