alt Hacker News> Free-scaling UIs were tried for years before that and never once got to acceptable quality.
The web is a free-scaling UI, which scales "responsively" in a seamless way from feature phones with tiny pixelated displays to huge TV-sized ultra high-resolution screens. It's fine.
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astrange • last Tuesday at 10:31 PM
That's actually a different kind of scaling. The one at issue here is closer to cmd-plus/minus on desktop browsers, or two-finger zooming on phones. It's hard to make that look good unless you only have simple flat UIs like the one on this website.
They did make another attempt at it for apps with Dynamic Type though.
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You are correct. I worked on this for years at Mozilla. See https://robert.ocallahan.org/2007/02/units-patch-landed_07.h... and https://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/11/relax-scaling-user-inte... for example. Some of the problems were pretty hard but the Web ended up in a pretty good place --- Web developers pretty much don't think about whether scaling factors are fractional or not, and things just work... well enough that some people don't even know the Web is "free-scaling UI"!