User blog comment:Susanolivia/Fixed Width, Sidebar, and the Removal of Monaco/@comment-12629-20101012081015

Why wasn't I notified of THIS blog post?? I keep getting notifications of all these semi-useless PR posts in blogs, and I almost missed this one.

Thank you for the explanation, even the attempt of finally trying to explain something in depth is much appreciated.

That said, I'd be very interested in where your designers are coming from, the printed press maybe? HTML was always about reflowing pages - this approach is a dead-end because:
 * Space is already being wasted in some common resolutions (I suspect 1024x768 is the only one where you make use of the full width), and as the commonly used resolution increases over time, this will only get worse (unless you increase the width over time, which means re-designing all the pages their creators thought to be of fixed width, which makes the whole thing pointless to begin with).
 * Mobile internet is currently on the rise, and those devices on the other hand have resolutions far below the fixed width. For the growing number of people accessing Wikia from a phone, the layout will either be re-flown by their browser (this is the better outcome, but again, it makes the assumption of pages always looking the same misleading and damaging for page creators), or their experience of Wikia will turn into a scroll-fest which isn't the best way to make a good impression.

However, this is just my argument. I am indescribably happy that now I at least have an argument to argue against. Thank you for this post, Wikia Staff.