Default pixel size of web browsers

Paul Thomas at Canonical (backers of Ubuntu) explains that the default pixel size of browsers is 12pt, or 16px.

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The Default pixel size of web browsers by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
November 24, 2008 |

Comments

One Response to “Default pixel size of web browsers”

  1. Nicolas Mailhot on November 24th, 2008 13:29

    Actually I’m quite surprised by all the comments in this thread. It looks like a 2006-era discussion to me.

    Browsers historically used 12pt as default font size. (it is the size recommended in electronic publications: big enough to be read by anyone without being too big to be too annoying to people with good vision).

    It happens that 12pt translates approximately to 16px with 96dpi hardware (windows default settings for a long time).

    However our current technical level permits much better displays today (OLPC XO is but one example) and at more than 150 dpi 16 pixels is tiny and unreadable.

    For those reasons the Linux desktops and Vista are getting rid of 96 dpi clamping.

    Which makes relying on a 16px baseline utter madness in the near future.

    (You can of course go into lala-lala land like Mofo and pretend that pixels are not really pixels but something very abstract like angles of view even though your software does actually use hardware pixels and not your pretty abstraction. In the end reality will win. And BTW how smart is it to measure vector objects in pixel units?).

    Please do take all the comments in this thread with a huge grain of salt and do not rely on them for actual recomandations.

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