Eh?
Oh, right, some people actually read the web with a maximized browser...
In wide screen (or worse), no less.
Studies have shown, the most pleasing and easy to read paragraphs are about 60 characters across. Which is about where 800x600 left off, given typical dot pitch and font scalings.
Between sidebars, margins and images, I personally don't find it practical to browse below 1000 width, but, I use little more, to achieve a manageable experience.
Treat yourself, and try viewing webpages in a narrower browser. You'll get more on screen (you can just about tile two windows side-by-side on a 1080p monitor), and have an easier time reading it.
4:3 monitors are better for this, because you get more vertical reading room (at 1600x1200, you can comfortably fit a single column sheet at full screen). 1080p just isn't quite enough to do that.
"Aha!", you might say, and turn the monitor sideways -- most LCDs are intended to operate that way as well; but alas, the width is then far too narrow, even for A4 size documents (which are quite narrow to begin with), plus if it's not a high quality monitor, the color banding along the now-horizontal axis is severely exaggerated, so that it is even more critical to be seated exactly in the center of your screen for best viewing.
(That said, portrait screens can be quite useful for certain limited applications. Heavy text editing, programming and such, is one such example.)
(For all three of these reasons -- the bad landscape ratio, the bad portrait ratio, and the bad color rendering and contrast -- I despise HD monitors. Yes, others can be had, but not for as cheap. To this day, one of the best displays remains a Trinitron CRT, in the 21" and 2048 x 1536 x 85Hz range, which still sell for $200 easy.)
So, yes -- there is indeed some intended method to viewing media. It's not [just
] snobbery, it's ergonomic science!
Returning to websites;
Conversely, there are viewers which might not even be able to see 1000 pixels wide. Back in the day, it used to be the users stuck with 640x480 and 800x600 screens, but nowadays, reduced resolutions have returned, and in vastly greater diversity -- and numbers! Indeed, Google reduces the PageRank of websites that don't support mobile[citation needed]. Sure, you can make a mobile version, but... if you can't afford a web development team to spin that... you better get it right the first time.
Finally, there's always been, and always will be, the fundamental concern of accessibility. Some viewers will have really strange resolutions (multiple monitors, oddball screens, mainframes, TVs...??!), scale factors, user style sheets and so forth, which all interact with the original document. Obviously you can't much control what a user style sheet will do, but you can at least make it easier by allowing DIVs and TABLEs and such to resize automatically. Fixed width is, and always has been, the bane of web design: the lowest, simplest, dumbest solution to making something look right, for one narrow set of platforms and viewers.
Please Dave, you can do better!
Tim
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