Death to px, long live ch

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• Hacker News
• Just leave the viewport size up to the user rather than making assumptions about which widths work best for people you don't know.

  Also despite the aggressive title, this article gives basically no reason for why you shouldn't use px.

  by account42
• I’d like to hear the author’s approach to vw and vh units. I’ve tended to use these units where I want a specific feel and it’s worked relatively well over the years. I’m surprised it was not mentioned given the justifying of ch was around the desire of a consistent layout.
  by squidlib
• What happened to em?
  by cynicalsecurity
• I'm still waiting for operating systems to adopt true physical units. You know, that trick PostScript printers have doing since the 80s (running at 300dpi no less). I realize there are large screen projectors in the wild, that's solvable problem. Bitmaps icons are also an issue, but again, solvable.
  by jeberle
• I also did some experiment with ch many years ago. I found that 60ch is ideal width for block text for easy reading. too bad it is pretty hard to make websites with only 60ch wide.
  by npn
• What I want to know is who decided to break px, the last thing we need is yet another screwball physical measurement, css was already full of them. But what "tut tut, everybody is using px and these new hi-dpi displays are rendering things really tiny, we can't have that" and now px as a useful unit is ruined.

  Is there a way to use real pixels? My, admittedly quick, search says no. at least nothing jumps out at me from the spec.

  by somat
• The article links to

  https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/11/the-myth-of-the-pixel-perfe...

  which confuses me, because I definitely remember pixels being visible when I was growing up. I remember the first time I got a 1080p monitor. I felt a visceral terror at the fact that I could no longer see the pixels.

  by andai
• I’ve found that ch and ex units are heavily influenced by latin characters. They just give weird results with non-latin characters leading to magic numbers. But the concept is really solid: use them if you want the spacing relative to text.
  by microflash