Apparently width = 800 *does* matter for web sites.
Posted by Nat Tuck
I recently got a nice big monitor - 25.5", 1920x1200 - and I discovered a neat feature of modern windowing systems that I really hadn’t used that much previously: non-maximized windows. On my monitor, it’s possible to put two windows next to each other and still have a useful amount of text in both.
Any application or web page that I do that with gets an oddly shaped "screen" to work on: 960x1200. That’s not quite the with of a 1024x768 screen, but something targetting 800x600 will fit fine.
I had been thinking about the relevence of 800-width pages already with the 800x480 displays on netbooks like the Eee PC, but my new monitor completely sells it for me. Going forward, I’m going to recommend targetting 800x480 as the minimum screen resolution and 960x1200 as a resolution to consider for any general-audience website or application.
Now, I really wish that screen resolution (in DPI) had actually gone up - but that hasn’t happened. Even my new 25.5" monitor is still the same 90 dpi that decent monitor were even in like 1993. But that’s a rant for another post.
