Torment of web designers with viewports

Translated article from alistapart.com by several authors that deals with the web designer’s woes with mobile (tablet) viewports.

Jeremy Keith’s eloquent statement : “The web is a deal” accurately captures the balance needed to create amazing things. Every week, new devices appear with different screen sizes, pixel densities, and other inputs, and we developers and designers agree to use a standard language, style, and program to create. Browser makers then agree to support these standards and predefined values ​​so that we can stand our ground.

Such an agreement has never been more important.

It always hurts when device or browser makers do something that goes against our agreement, and it’s especially annoying if it’s a very well-known and trusted player in the market – like Apple.

Apple’s smaller tablet, the iPad Mini, creates an awkward situation: its screen has the same number of pixels as the original iPad with a resolution of 768 x 1024 pixels, even though the Mini version’s screen is 40% smaller. As a result, every button, graphic, or line of text feels tiny on the iPad Mini, despite our efforts to create flexible apps that should work across devices.

 

Two iPads – one too small

But Apple itself is not the culprit – this is a problem that arose together with the use of viewports and which is related not only to pixels, but also to our habits. Let’s take a look at history to better understand where our current woes started and what we need to do about it.

wo devices, each with a two-inch display. The iran phone number data device on the right with a resolution of 640 x 960 contains four times more pixels in the same space as the display on the left with a resolution of 320 x 480.

phone number data

The first display has a resolution

Pixels, the second has a resolution of 640 x 960 pixels. In other words: it contains 4x improve your social presence more pixels, but is displayed in the same area. Smaller pixels mean that the content is smaller – everything is sharper, but much harder to read.

This is exactly what happened to the Nokia E60 . Back in 2005, common display sizes were around 1.25″ with an average of 176 pixel

s wide, but the E60, which featured a “large” display with a resolution of 352 x 416 pixels, crammed more or less twice as many pixels cz lists into the large space. The result was an amazingly sharp but hard-to-read display.

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