Can you have a 0.5px border on a Retina Display?

I wrote an overview of different techniques:

Half-pixel border

border: 0.5px solid black;

Cons:

  • Works only in Firefox and Webkit Nightly.

border-image

border-width: 1px;
border-image: url(border.gif) 2 repeat;

border.gif is a 6×6 pixel image:

border image explained

Pros:

  • It works!

Cons:

  • An external image. It’s only 51 bytes and it can be inlined using Data URI. You’d need to fire up Photoshop (or whatever you use) to change the border color, which isn’t very convenient.

Multiple background images

background:
    linear-gradient(180deg, black, black 50%, transparent 50%) top    left  / 100% 1px no-repeat,
    linear-gradient(90deg,  black, black 50%, transparent 50%) top    right / 1px 100% no-repeat,
    linear-gradient(0,      black, black 50%, transparent 50%) bottom right / 100% 1px no-repeat,
    linear-gradient(-90deg, black, black 50%, transparent 50%) bottom left  / 1px 100% no-repeat;

“How to target physical pixels on retina screens with CSS” describes how to draw a line. Draw 4 lines and we have a border.

Pros:

  • No external images.

Cons:

  • Cumbersome syntax, although it can be abstracted out with CSS preprocessors.

Scale up and down

Mentioned here already by Priit Pirita.


Use border-width: 0.5px

Safari 8 (in both iOS and OS X) brings border-width: 0.5px. You can use that if you’re ready to accept that current versions of Android and old versions of iOS and OS X will just show a regular border (a fair compromise in my opinion).

You can’t use this directly though, because browsers that don’t know about 0.5px borders will interpret it as 0px. No border. So what you need to do is add a class to your <html> element when it is supported:

if (window.devicePixelRatio && devicePixelRatio >= 2) {
  var testElem = document.createElement('div');
  testElem.style.border = '.5px solid transparent';
  document.body.appendChild(testElem);
  if (testElem.offsetHeight == 1)
  {
    document.querySelector('html').classList.add('hairlines');
  }
  document.body.removeChild(testElem);
}
// This assumes this script runs in <body>, if it runs in <head> wrap it in $(document).ready(function() {   })

Then, using retina hairlines becomes really easy:

div {
  border: 1px solid #bbb;
}

.hairlines div {
  border-width: 0.5px;
}

Best of all, you can use border-radius with it. And you can use it with the 4 borders (top/right/bottom/left) as easily.

Source: http://dieulot.net/css-retina-hairline

Tags:

Safari

Iphone

Subpixel

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