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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?"
Why do web designers still have to target a particular resolution? Back when image scaling sucked (well, it still does) and layout was done with a complex series of pixel-aligned tables, I can see why this was necessary. These days, CSS should allow web developers to scale their site to any resolution, or even any media! (Look at the w3c's CSS recommendations for screen and print media).
Web layou should no longer be done in pixels, period. This will even -look- a lot better, not to mention fit a lot more resolutions, once SVG or similar vector-rendering support is built into browsers. This shouldn't be far off for Mozilla, and IE will have to catch up.
At home I have 1280x960, at work I have everything from 800x600 to 1400x1050. However, I rarely have my browser window wider than 900 pixels. This browser window I'm using right now is 875 pixels wide. When I'm web surfing it is rarely the only thing I'm doing, don't make me use up the whole screen.
Our site was designed for 1024x768, this site is running since January; the stats are since the end of March. It's a webshop (computer hardware) in the Netherlands. Numbers were found using a hidden frame that posts a form with values filled in by a bit of javascript.
Of course, designing for a fixed resolution is bad, should always look good, yadda yadda... It'll work on lower resolutions but you may have to scroll sideways now and then.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
I would personally escort the idiots who have splash pages to their own corner of hell. Numerous times I go to sites and get a blank page. It turns out they decide that there is *no* way I can possibly experience their site without having both Javascript and Flash turned on. You see they use the Javascript to run the Flash. (I have a proxy that kills nosey javascripts). Feel free to do that in the depths of your site where Flash may be appropriate but preventing entry to the very front page is idiotic.
The other thing I detest is sites that decide how many pixels everything should be. I run Mozilla maximized to 1600x1200 on a 21" monitor. Numerous sites think I can read text a few pixels high. I can't. I turned on the Mozilla preference that lets me enforce the minimum point size.
Even the Google Answers site linked to screws it up. Their horizontal ad bar at the top gets vertically truncated since they decided to allocate a fixed number of pixels to it. Other sites have borders around the article as a fixed length and so I get articles abruptly terminating and have to drag the mouse on the text to see what is below the end of the arbitrary bottom border.
As everyone else says in these comments, stop trying to control stuff to pixels and instead specify the big picture for the layout. If you have to ask the question about what the best viewed size is, then your design is badly broken.
What most people refer to as a 'minimum' resolution is really a fixed resolution.
There are valid and reasonable cases for choosing a 'minimum' resolution, expecially when you are designing web apps or intranet apps that would be too awkward to use efficiently if you didn't have the on screen real estate.
However, the reason most people use a 'minimum' resolution is that they do not have the skills to make sites that can scale easily so they choose a size that they can work with. Because they don't scale, then they stay the same size no matter what the window size is. How many sites have you been to where, when you maximise the window, the content is only on the left 2/3 of the screen??
These are 'Fixed' resolution sites, not 'minimum'. And we will be stuck with them until these alleged developers actually learn how and why they should use the available technologies (CSS, JavaScript, etc). Stop accepting their 'excuses' for not using them, check if they are making these decisions because they aren't qualified enough to make the call.