Lars Wirzenius blogged

about the end of bitmaps.

I do know his problems very well: both my current and my previous notebook feature 1600 by 1200 pixels on an 15 inch screen. That makes 135 dpi.

So I’m at around the double of the “traditional” dpi value, which was 75 dpi for a normal screen. (Albeit most users are at around 96 dpi now I think)

I do not think, bitmaps will come to an end. There is so much you can easily do with bitmaps that is hard to do with vector graphics.

But: Web design will have to adopt to that. Bitmaps in the web will no longer be displayed 1:1 on the screen, but will require scaling or similar adoption.

I think I’ve seen a web page investigating the possibilities to have images being automatically scaled to match your font size. I thought it was Clagnut Sandbox, but there are only some related things. Sorry I don’t remember the correct page. Maybe it was on A List apart (another of the best CSS tech sites I know) but I couldn’t find it there with a quick look-over, either.

I think the core idea was, that in about every browser, 1 em is 16 px. (For a reasonable font size on a standard screen at least), so you divide your image size by 16 and give it in em units. If a user uses a bigger font (or uses the zoom button of his browser), the image will scale with the text. Sounds interesting for me. Unfortunately, zoomed images may look awkward sometimes (but that is generally the case when you should indeed use vector graphics and not bitmaps…).

P.S. Lars, there is no Eric Conspiracy. Especially not since I’m not aware of coolness points for not recruiting yourself, but using the headers anyway.