The Ultimate Question, almost! If you look at various large websites such as BBC News you'll see that it has a fixed width, I'm sure appropriate to the current most common screen resolution of 1280x1024, but you'll also notice that it doesn't fill this by any means. For desktop use I reckon this is about right, I aim for no wider than about 700 pixels for a fixed width page. If you aim to have a lot of text then you could go for a completely dynamic layout which will fill the browser window no matter how wide it gets.
Smart use of CSS will allow mobile devices to display the page more easily, design decisions such as the use of graphics can have a big impact in this area as it can be more difficult to scale than text.
|