<story><title>Show HN: USA.css – units set in inches, 1776 bytes</title><url>https://bennettfeely.com/usacss/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chrismorgan</author><text>Feels strange to have single decimal places in your inch figures. I’d have expected something like eighths, sixteenths and thirty-seconds of inches, even though the decimal representation of them is unwieldy (1⁄32″ becomes 0.03125in). That also helps you avoid fractional pixels, which is worth doing if convenient: 1⁄32″ is 3px, because 1in is defined as 96px.&lt;p&gt;(As an Australian, the main place I’ve ever seen fractions of inches is old tools like spanners from before the adoption of the metric system, and that’s all fractions with powers-of-two denominators. But maybe Americans use decimal fractions of inches? I suppose I have seen laptop screens described in that way, e.g. 13.1″, 15.4″ and 15.6″, though people typically truncate to the inch.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>amyjess</author><text>All small measurements in the US are done in power-of-two fractions of an inch. In fact, much of the initial opposition to the metric system here was led by the construction industry, who has found from experience that 1&amp;#x2F;2&amp;quot; 1&amp;#x2F;4&amp;quot; 1&amp;#x2F;8&amp;quot; 1&amp;#x2F;16&amp;quot; etc. measurements are too convenient to ever give up.</text></comment>
<story><title>Show HN: USA.css – units set in inches, 1776 bytes</title><url>https://bennettfeely.com/usacss/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>chrismorgan</author><text>Feels strange to have single decimal places in your inch figures. I’d have expected something like eighths, sixteenths and thirty-seconds of inches, even though the decimal representation of them is unwieldy (1⁄32″ becomes 0.03125in). That also helps you avoid fractional pixels, which is worth doing if convenient: 1⁄32″ is 3px, because 1in is defined as 96px.&lt;p&gt;(As an Australian, the main place I’ve ever seen fractions of inches is old tools like spanners from before the adoption of the metric system, and that’s all fractions with powers-of-two denominators. But maybe Americans use decimal fractions of inches? I suppose I have seen laptop screens described in that way, e.g. 13.1″, 15.4″ and 15.6″, though people typically truncate to the inch.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cjsawyer</author><text>Engineering and machining specifications are usually in 0.001” and referred to as thousandth’s or “thou’s”. Tools like wrenches or drill bits use fractions in the form x+1&amp;#x2F;2^n like 2 1&amp;#x2F;2 == 2.5”. It goes down to 1&amp;#x2F;64, I think.</text></comment>