User blog comment:Susanolivia/Fixed Width, Sidebar, and the Removal of Monaco/@comment-88.108.98.29-20101001191113

to be fair, does any of this really matter if Monaco is better than Oasis? I mean, that advert is annoying to have to work around, especially with an infobox on the right meaning we have to with-hold images under the first header.

a fixed width sounds sensible, it means everyone views it the same. But I never like to use them myself. Percentages means people with massive page-widths don't lose out... and people with 600x800 (or 800x600, can't remember which way round) don't lose out. Of course, that's not quite true because images have fixed widths and infoboxes usually do too...

So essentially what you're doing is taking the advert, a relatively small annoyance, and then making an annoying skin. You can argue it doesn't have to be tested on different resolutions and browsers. This is true, but then we don't have to nowadays. The only time I remember this being an issue is most browsers not using the -moz-border-radius CSS classes, which just means users won't have rounded corners, and a certain Gallery template that Safari didn't like the code for but was fixed. Both of these issues still exist, these are browser differences that using Oasis can't change. So the resolution differences: I always did care that pages weren't exactly designed to fit-well on 600x800, and you did kinda kill it with the advert... but I don't use it anymore and there's only an extreme minority that do.

So... you might make Oasis sound better, but I can never actually see it that way.