Retina Display and the Web

[Franciturci]

I have bought the New iPad recently, and noticed that many major websites (newspapers, forums, blogs) have no compatibility layer for retina displays, showing blurred logos, buttons etc.

I know that part of the content will be hard to be updated (i.e. photos) but as far as graphic elements are concerned, there exist many resolution independent options (SVG for instance).

My questions (for people having their iPad in the last six months): have you noticed any improvement in the resolution of your favorite website? do you think that a positive trend is on the way?

 

[Menel]

I have bought the New iPad recently, and noticed that many major websites (newspapers, forums, blogs) have no compatibility layer for retina displays, showing blurred logos, buttons etc.

I know that part of the content will be hard to be updated (i.e. photos) but as far as graphic elements are concerned, there exist many resolution independent options (SVG for instance).

My questions (for people having their iPad in the last six months): have you noticed any improvement in the resolution of your favorite website? do you think that a positive trend is on the way?

PNG, vector graphics should scale. I found the greatest benefit was reading text. I don't have to zoom in near as often, as the small text is crisp and not blurry.

 

[Beta Particle]

I don’t know that we’ll have a widespread shift to vector graphics on the web (at least not SVG) because they’re computationally expensive compared to bitmapped graphics and can be quite a bit larger in filesize for complex images.

I do think we’ll see a shift towards rendering more of a page using text & CSS rather than graphics at all though. It’s surprising to me how many web designers do just use static graphics on their page, as I’ve always done as much in code as possible, specifically because images look bad when scaled up. (this was a problem before Retina displays too)

However, while the graphics are scaled, they still look better than they did on older devices. Here is a comparison I did a while ago between the iPad 2 (left) and iPad 3 on this site:

As you can see, even graphics such as the “Post Reply” button look better on the Retina display, even though it is not a retina-optimised image.