Instead of exploring the benefits of flexible web design, we rely on a little white lie: “minimum screen resolution.” These three words contain a powerful magic, under the cover of which we churn out fixed-width layout after fixed-width layout, perhaps revisiting a design every few years to “bump up” the width once it’s judged safe enough to do so. “Minimum screen resolution” lets us design for a contrived subset of users who see our design as god and Photoshop intended. These users always browse with a maximized 1024×768 window, and are never running, say, an OLPC laptop, or looking at the web with a monitor that’s more than four years old. If a user doesn’t meet the requirements of “minimum screen resolution,” well, then, it’s the scrollbar for them, isn’t it?

Of course, when I was coding the site, I didn’t have the luxury of writing a diatribe on the evils of fixed-width design. Instead, I was left with a sobering fact: while we’d designed a rather complex grid to serve the client’s content needs, the client—and by extension, the client’s users—was asking for a fluid layout. As almost all of the grid-based designs I could list off at that time were rigidly fixed-width, I was left with a prickly question: how do you create a fluid grid?

via A List Apart: Articles: Fluid Grids .

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