Show HN: USA.css – units set in inches, 1776 bytes (opens in new tab)

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 1/2" 1/4" 1/8" 1/16" etc. measurements are too convenient to ever give up.

Rulers, drill bits, and wrenches typically use fractions of an inch where the denominator is a power of two, but circuit board design often uses decimal fractions of an inch. The holes in a breadboard are commonly .1 inches apart.

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+1/2^n like 2 1/2 == 2.5”. It goes down to 1/64, I think.

Since several of the lengths are in fifths of an inch, I thought it was a secret desire for the metric system.

We usually use fractions, but sometimes we're forced to use decimals, usually when related to computers, since the usual fractions don't translate well to decimal.

Huh, I didn't know about this, that feet and inches used to differ across the world. If only they'd done pints, fluid ounces, and cups, etc. too!

(Cups are particularly annoying: there's British, US, US Legal, and metric. The best recipe-following advice is that it's never going to matter. But it's annoying.)

The units were already defined in relation to metric units (officially through the Medenhall Order in the US though the OWM had officiously been doing that for some time, officiously through the Weights and Measures Act of 1897 in the UK as while it defined the meter in terms of yard, as the precision of the meter increased the yard followed rather than led), but different countries used slightly different conversion factors.

Hence international inches, not metric inches.

I’m sure it inherits from the DPI your monitor reports.

I wonder if any manufacturers let you specify which one you mean, or if it’s like drives, where they always pick the smaller one to make a few extra pennies.

The standards boards should step in to avoid confusion.

American inches.

Was your point against the user, the concept, the measurement standard, or just triggered by any vague mentioning of the United States?

It's difficult to sort through the negative sentiments to get to real point. Be more clear with your hostility and anger next time, would'ya?

Drinking from an obsolete CE pint glass here. Brexit!!! (?)

And 1812 when I clicked just now.

This must mean something!

Mostly useful for print stylesheets. On screens it seems to be defined as a constant 96px[1], which means it has no correspondence to physical inches.

[1]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/09/css-length-explained/

Système international? We already use french units

Uhhh why France?

Given your previous comments, this looks like trolling. Please stop posting like this to HN.

Thank you! I for one am not self loathing and proud of my country and thinks it doesn't need to be destroyed as a prerequisite to getting better

Patriotism is about fighting for the principles and values espoused in the constitution, and working towards improving an imperfect republic, not worshiping the flag.

It’s a fun project and I like the colors, but let’s not pretend that the flag and the idea of ‘patriotism’ are anything other than distractions from the work that needs to be done.

If you need to rive a 5cm length in twain and you don't like fractions. Or if you're making a website devoted to larval geometer moths.

meh, call it done. it's modifiable by the user, so leave it alone and let the user mess with it. i have no idea what the author's intentions are/were for the project, but it seems like 'mission accomplished'.

It's just a bit of fun. Not everything has to be some sort of statement.

I think its really great that this exists. Bonus points for it being a public project on GitHub that any American can contribute to. It's also really hard to argue with the licensing terms.