posted 21 years ago
Amusingly, the inch is officially defined these days in metric terms. That is, one inch is EXACTLY 2.54cm.
Nominal screen pixel size is 72/inch. If you want more precision, consider that monitor specs are freqently advertised at around .28.
Where EXACT physical screen size is important, applications usually request calibrations. For example, The Gimp pulls info from the windowing system, and also allows you to type in the actual measurements you get by holding a ruler up to your screen and telling it what size displayed reference lines are.
My guidelines are that stand-alone applications should (with rare expections) be runnable on a 640x480 display and web apps should be usable in an 800x600. Probably most people can do at least 1024x768 these days, but why force them?
It's almost impossible to force the physical sizes in an html table. If you're looking to generate a report and want to ensure that the tables come out properly, you're better off generating a PDF.
Even discounting the peculiar problems of HTML, a general-purpose program should be tested at multiple resolutions - the text fields often actually take up MORE space on a higher-resolution display under MS-Windows!
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.