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When will 1024x768 Replace 800x600 for Web Design?
Dr.X asks: "It seems as users get bigger and better monitors and video cards, the standard for web resolution is slowly approaching 1024. There is a fairly in depth answer over at Google stating that we are likely to be safe at 800x600 but when will we hit 1024 as the standard. What's Slashdot's opinion?"
I agree, and I've noticed lately that many major sites have been redesigned for scaling e.g. oracle.com. IBM.com still constrains their layout to a fixed resolution though.
I can guess why some people would still want to design fixed-resolution sites. Some of these web-designers probably come from a print background, and as a result of their training, they are stuck with a lot of print-specific notions that are admittedly hard to discard.
I have to concede that designing for a fixed resolution is simply easier in most cases (especially if you use a lot of bitmaps and rely on oldskool 1-px tricks to achieve your layout). Fixed resolutions give you absolute coordinates, which are just more convenient to work with. To some extent, they also help to ensure your layout's robustness across browsers (e.g. a width="30%" doesn't always give you 30% in all browsers) The layout at wolfram.com, for instance, would have been more difficult to achieve using scalable elements.
CSS solves a big part of the problem by giving you a level of control that allows for precision layout, but unfortunately some elements like bitmaps just don't scale (and SVG isn't widespread yet).
The other (albeit inadvertent) benefit of contraining the size of a page to a lowest-common-denominator fixed resolution like 640x480, is that it keeps the text-width small for the majority of people who run at higher resolutions. The advantage of doing this is the same as the advantage of having columns: studies have shown that shorter text-widths make for higher readability.
Having said that, I prefer scalable-resolution websites myself.
At the end of the day, it's about achieving a balance between function and form. And it's really really hard to do, so most people choose one or the other. Props to you if you can do both.
I kind of know what you mean, but to tell the truth, I don't want something that scales up to my resolution and looks huge on the screen (like a pdf does with the new windows viewer - yuk.) Clever use of CSS should allow more content to show when more space is available - rather than just making the existing content bigger.