High-resolution screens and anti-aliasing

John Gruber, in a Linked List item:

But if you prefer anti-aliasing even for coding fonts — and in our coming-someday-soon resolution-indepenedent future, we all will — there are a bunch of good options.

Emphasis mine. Isn’t the opposite the case? When was the last time (or the first time, for that matter) that you saw anti-aliasing applied on a printer? Never, probably. And the reason is simple: their resolution (in terms of dot density) is far higher than that of a screen. Text (and line art, for that matter) is rendered at such high detail that aliasing would never be perceivable to the human eye to begin with.

Anti-aliasing as well as subpixel rendering were created primarily as a workaround for relatively low pixel density, not because they were particularly good solutions. And the resolution-independent UI that has been worked towards by Apple as well as other OS vendors is intended primarily to account for a future where screens’ densities finally – after many years of near-stagnancy – will start increasing to 200 pixels per inch and beyond.

Yet, the way I read Gruber’s assertion, he is implying that this will make anti-aliasing more relevant and more useful. It’ll make it more pleasant, but only so because it’ll actually have far less of an effect. So, at the same time, it’ll become less relevant and less useful.

I believe (or hope) that we’ll one day be at the point where anti-aliasing is superseded by having pixels whose aliasing is so subtle and tiny that you can’t make it out, try as you may.