Hi-Res Screens are a Natural Progression for the Web

It seems like only yes­ter­day we as web de­velopers over­came the chal­lenges of de­vel­op­ing for mul­tiple screen sizes that an­oth­er chal­lenge comes along: high res­ol­u­tion screens. No longer does 72ppi based graph­ics look sharp on the new hi-res Apple products be­cause of the dens­ity change — the pixels per inch (ppi) have been doubled. While it’s a chal­lenge to ac­com­mod­ate both desktop and mo­bile “ret­ina” devices, I be­lieve desktop will even­tu­ally go to hi-res as well.

You can see how we’re pro­gress­ively view­ing in­form­a­tion. The prin­ted doc­u­ment is be­com­ing ob­sol­ete and the ma­jor­ity of in­form­a­tion will be viewed on tab­lets, phones and desktop in the fu­ture. Everything will be on a screen. People will want the same feel of pa­per and the same sharp­ness of phys­ic­al print. Print’s stand­ard res­ol­u­tion is 300dpi (dots per inch). Maybe this num­ber will be ap­plied to screens too, per­haps 300ppi?

I don’t know the num­bers, I just see it go­ing here and while it’ll be a chal­lenge to de­vel­op sites while desktop gets on board, I wel­come it and un­der­stand why Apple came out with the ret­ina dis­play: be­cause they are the lead­ers in this kind of stuff. Soon we’ll be en­cour­aged to get a hi-res mon­it­or to match our sharp mo­bile devices. This happened with DVD to Blu­eRay and with TV to HDTV. As tech con­tin­ues to mim­ic real life, this is how things will go.