Is there any difference between user units and pixels? - html

Question

I've been reading several articles about SVG that make a clear distinction between using and not using units (this last case even has a name of its own), e.g.
<!-- the viewport will be 800px by 600px -->
<svg width="800" height="600">
<!-- SVG content drawn onto the SVG canvas -->
</svg>
In SVG, values can be set with or without a unit identifier. A
unitless value is said to be specified in user space using user units.
If a value is specified in user units, then the value is assumed to be
equivalent to the same number of “px” units. This means that the
viewport in the above example will be rendered as a 800px by 600px
viewport.
You can also specify values using units. The supported length unit
identifiers in SVG are: em, ex, px, pt, pc, cm, mm, in, and
percentages.
source
Is there any actual difference between omiting the unit and setting it to px?
Can I just set e.g. mm everywhere to avoid ambiguity, or I'll eventually be getting different results?
<svg width="800mm" height="600mm">

Answer 1

Disclaimer: what follows is pure guessing (I only learnt the basics of SVG last week) but I'm sharing it because I believe it could help others with my same doubts and I hope it doesn't contain serious errors.
The SVG canvas is basically a mental concept—a infinite plane where you use Cartesian coordinates to place stuff and move around. It isn't too different from stroking shapes in a sheet of graph paper where you've drawn a cross to identify an arbitrary point as coordinate origin, except that notebooks are not infinite. In the same way that tou draw a 3-square radius circle in the sheet and you don't care that those squares represent 12 mm, you draw shapes in your SVG canvas using unitless dimensions because it doesn't really matter what exact physical size they represent. The SVG spec uses the term "user units" to express this idea.
Using actual units only makes sense in two situations:
When our virtual user units need to interact with real world, e.g., the canvas is to be printed in a computer monitor.
When we want an element in our graph to be defined in such a way that it doesn't scale, neither up nor down, e.g. a stroke around a letter that needs to look identical no matter how we resize the logo it belongs to.
It's in this situation, more specifically #1, when the px equivalence comes in handy. When we need to render the graph or make calculations what involve actual units, unitless dimensions are interpreted as pixels. We can think of it as a default because we can render the canvas any size and, in any case, pixels are no longer physical pixels in these days of high-res displays and builtin zoom.
And, for all this, it's probably better to just omit units in your SVG code. Adding them in a general basis only makes code unnecessarily verbose.