High

25 April 2006

You may have read the latest post on the Safari Development blog on High DPI web sites. It’s a great proposal – we certainly need some way of allowing web sites to work well on high DPI devices; don’t forget that these proposals will aid printed sites as well, meaning that outputting hi quality print documents from a web based system may finally be possible.

Of course, what is being proposed could almost certainly be achieved – to a certain extent – using javascript to scale the page elements either based on the browser width or a user preference. We can even dynamically load in higher res images based on the current size of the image in the browser.

Also, this article almost guaranties that we’ll get a resolution independent UI in Mac OS X Leopard – why would they be working on this tech if we weren’t? I’m also sticking to my guns and going to reiterate my belief that we’ll get a system wide interface overhaul at the same time. Aqua itself is now getting pretty long in the tooth, and for resolution independence Apple are going to have to redo all the resources anyway. There’s also the possibility that Apple will move to using vectors in the interface – which wouldn’t suit Aqua’s pseudo realism, but would suit the general direction Apple are going with iTunes and the iLife suite.

From: Articles

25 April 2006