[whatwg] Processing the zoom level - MS extensions to window.screen

[Glenn Maynard]

On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 3:24 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:

> On Wed, 29 Dec 2010, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> > I hit this problem in a UI I worked on.  It rendered into a canvas the
> > size of the window, which can be zoomed and scrolled around.  At 100%
> > full page zoom this works well.  At 120% zoom, it creates a canvas
> > smaller than the window, which is then scaled back up by the browser,
> > resulting in a blurry image.  Full page zoom should work on the UI
> > around it--I didn't want to disable it entirely--but the canvas itself
> > should be created in display pixels, rather than CSS pixels.
> >
> > I didn't find any reasonable workaround.  All I can do is tell people
> > not to use full-page zoom.  Many users probably see a blurry image and
> > don't know why, since there's no way to detect full-page zoom in most
> > browsers to even hint the user about the problem.
>
> That's a bug in the browser. If it knows it's going to be zooming up the
> canvas when it creates the backing store, it should be using a bigger
> backing store.
>

It sounds like you're saying that, if the user's full-page zoom level is
110% and the page requests a 100x100 canvas, the browser should create a
110x110 backing store instead.  There are several problems with that:

- The full-zoom level can be changed by the user after the canvas is already
rendered.  If I load a page at 100%, the canvas renders at that resolution,
and then I change the full-zoom level to 110%, there's no way for the
browser to know this and use a bigger backing store in advance.
- The data would have to be downscaled to the exposed 100x100 resolution
when exported with ImageData.  This means that retrieving, modifying and
re-importing ImageData would be lossy.  Similarly, rendering a 100x100 image
into a canvas set to 100x100 would upscale the image, blurring it: the
developer should be able to expect that blitting a 100x100 image into a
100x100 canvas will be a 1:1 copy.
- If, rather than displaying it in the document at the full-zoom level, the
data is sent to the server, the results would be blurry.  For example, if I
create a 1000x1000 canvas (and the browser's backing store is actually
1100x1100), and I send the finished data to the server (at the exposed
1000x1000), the browser has to resample the final image, blurring it.

If that's not what you meant, could you clarify?

 I went to books.google.com, opened up the first book in my library, and
> zoomed in, and it reflowed and rerendered the text to be quite crisp. I
> don't see any problem here. Images were similiarly handled beautifully.
>
> Could you elaborate on the steps to reproduce this problem?
>

(I tried this, and text was blurry even when I zoomed using only that page's
built-in zoom mechanism; it seemed to be scaling the rendered page and not
rerendering text at all.  I figured some books might not be OCR'd so I tried
another couple books, but it still happened; then it somehow crashed FF3, so
I gave up.)

-- 
Glenn Maynard