Blocks of text are only comfortable to read if around the 10 words mark in length, narrower or wider and it becomes harder to read.

While the theory of liquid layouts is sound, its rare that you will find multiple liquid layouts that work well with the same window size, so you end up resizing either the text or the window to fix this.

Fixed layouts assist here, but aren't perfect themselves. A slightly better option is fixed based on ems, but even that can have drawbacks on some systems, especially those with odd resolutions.

People are suggesting that liquid solves mobile viewing issues. This is a half truth at best. You can't know the quirks the device has, only guess, so you are better to just design in a standard way and let the device reformat to suit itself. If you really must accommodate mobile users, then there is always the option of a specific stylesheet for that platform.

While I long ago decided fixed was not appropriate to serve my needs, when screens started getting r-e-a-l-l-y wide, liquid didn't really work either.

I prefer a variant of elastic, where a site will shrink to a certain minimum width, depending on the audience, and grow to a width short of making the line-lengths too long for comfort, all in aid of suiting as many clients as possible without driving the writers/coders nuts.

My 2¢ worth.

It's not just about the widescreens, either. Think about all those 1024x600 netbooks that are selling like hotcakes these days. Not to mention the iPhones, Android phones, Nokia tablets (800x480), and similar.

Design around a fixed width and you're guaranteed to cause problems for some devices. Flex is the polite way to go, and I'd say it's more in keeping with the inclusive spirit of Linux.

<MR>

Hey there, shiny happy Linux Journal people!

I would suggest a new poll . . . "Who really, really, really hates fixed width sites with a passion?"
a) Me
b) That guy over there.
c) That girl right there.
d) All right thinking people do (right as in 'correct')
e) Huh? Why would you want fixed width sites?

What? You don't think I like fixed width sites? Oh, come on. Where would you get such an idea. [ insert appropriate smiley here ]

-- Marcel

I prefer fixed layouts because of the same reasons the others, who prefer fixed websites, said. But it depends on the content of a website, weather it should be fixed or flex.

For small company websites (by that I mean small businesses of 1-25 staff) I will always go for the fixed width. I vary it between 775px and 900px in width dependent on the company's targeted market. Whichever way you go though, as long as it doesn't break when you make your browser smaller to view a selected area whilst multi-tasking then go for it.

From a usability standpoint, I would say that interactive sites with lots of forms/gadgets/gizmo/go-faster-stripe mods or whatever you can think of without saying Web 2.0 (couldn't resist saying it), are best as floating width and mainly static text content rich sites are best as fixed.

Very wide text lines are harder to follow.
Around 50 to 70 chars is the ideal.

Of course you can always disable the page style (View -> Page_Style -> No_Style in Firefox menu) to have the default rendering (with fonts and colors as defined in the browser preferences). There are also extensions to add buttons and/or hotkeys to toggle that.

Flex(ible), fluid width designs are more visually appealing and cater to users with larger screens. Fixed width designs are better for sites heavy on graphics and light on text. Fixed width designs are easier to work with, really, but fluid designs often look better when designed with larger screens in mind.

--
Colin Dean
www.cad.cx
www.bioslevel.com
www.thinkcomputers.org