Should websites expand on window resize?

Question

I'm asking this question purely from a usability standpoint!

Should a website expand/stretch to fill the viewing area when you resize a browser window?

I know for sure there are the obvious cons:

• Wide columns of text are hard to read.
• Writing html/css using percents can be a pain.
• It makes you vulnerable to having your design stretched past it's limits if an image is too wide, or a block of text is added that is too long. (see it's a pain to code the html/css).

The only Pro I can think of is that users who use the font-resizing that is built into their browser won't have to deal with columns that are only a few words long, with a body of white-space on either side.

However, I think that may be a browser problem more than anything else (Firefox 3 allows you to zoom everything instead of just the text, which comes in handy all the time)

edit: I noticed stack overflow is fixed width, but coding horror resizes. It seems Jeff doesn't have a strong preference either way.

Answer 1

Raw HTML does just that. Are you changing your data so that it doesn't render so good in random sized windows?

In the olden days, everyone had VGA screens. Now, that resolution is most uncommon. Who knows what resolutions are going to be common in the future? And why expect a certain minimum width or height?

From a usability viewpoint, demanding a certain resolution from your users is just going to create a degraded experience for anyone not using that resolution. Another thing that comes from this is what is fixed width? I've seen plenty of fixed size windows (popups) that just don't render right because my fonts are different from the designer's.

Answer 2

In terms of web site scaling I like fixed sized web sites that scales nicely using the browsers "zoom" function. I don't want a really wide page with tiny fonts on my 1920 res monitor. I don't know if the web designer has to do anything to make it scale nicely when zoomed, but the zoom in FF3 is awesome, the one in IE7 is useless...