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Jared M. Spool:

> A 1024x768 screen still comes in somewhere around 72 dpi.

I know you're not a designer Jared, but unlike "best-practices" resolution
depends on context, as well. :-)

DPI is a printing measure, as in how many dots of ink or toner a printer can
place within an inch. It's different from SPI, which is a measure of how
many samples per inch an input device like a scanner can acquire. And
there's also LPI, which is a measure of how many lines of halftone spots a
printer can reproduce to simulate continuous tone images. What you are
referring to, PPI, is a measure of the samples your screen displays in
pixels.

So the word "resolution" without reference to the media is a meaningless
term. For example, you can scan a picture at 150 SPI, look at it on a 96 PPI
monitor, print it on a laser printer at 600 DPI and it'll probably be around
75 LPI. What the heck is the "resolution" here?

> A newspaper rings in at 2400dpi.

Newspapers print around 85 LPI, magazines around 133-150 LPI. There are
probably not a lot of newspapers that print on coarse stock at 2,400 DPI.

> In a standard paper, you get a lot more resolution to play with.

That doesn't mean much. For example, I'm now looking at a 30" Apple monitor
that has a 2,560x1,600 pixel optimum "resolution" @ 0.25mm pitch. The
'visual' density of pictorial material on this monitor is much higher than a
newspaper, if you were to compare apples and oranges. I can zoom in on this
monitor to make the period at the end of this sentence fill the entire
screen, in all its super-sharp, vectorized glory. Even the up-sampling of
the bitmaps to match the scaling will produce respectable results. Who has
more 'resolution'' to play here?
 
> How much whitespace do you find on their front pages?

Only a guy who gets paid to play with numbers would know the answer. :-)
Unlike a newspaper, a web 'page' is infinite in at least one direction:
welcome to the difference between physical and virtual worlds!

> People *want* a lot of information at their fingertips.

Only a non-designer could go from this unsupported (but seemingly harmless)
hypothesis to the actual interface design of throwing the proverbial kitchen
sink at the user. 
 
> So, a newspaper is a very dense page with extremely high resolution.

Newspapers are very dense because of the physicality/economics of the
medium. As printed things go, newspapers are among the lowest resolution
items around, not counting your neighborhood leaflet.

> We're no way near that with our current screen technology.

I have personally worked on 72, 96, 106, 150 and 240 pixel monitors. The
latter was better than any printed material I have ever seen.

As you may know the *currently* shipping Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is
resolution-independent, app by app. You can use the developer tools to see
the effects. It's not yet recommended for OS-wide implementation by Apple.
But the dinky video card in my PowerBook drives both a 2,560x1,600 px and a
1,440x900 px monitor simultaneously, that's 3 million pixels.

So the user experience of me reading PDFs on my 30" monitor is way, way
better than the same material in print.

I think you may have read too much Tufte on resolution/density, one of the
(few) areas I and other designers disagree with him.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba