Why would you choose a fixed-width design?

Question

Update: I deleted my motivation because it seems to distract readers. This is not about "why don't you make your window smaller". See the screenshots and you will see obstructed text because of fixed width. See my reference to "em/ex" notation in CSS. I would like to have a real discussion here. Thank you.

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Now I would like to ask real experts on this topic -- I'm not a web designer -- why fixed width layout are still that popular and if there are really good reasons for it. (you are welcome to point out reasons against it as well.)

• Is it too hard to design your layout relatively (from start on)? It seems some people even forgot how to do it.

• Do you have real reasons like readability and just don't know how to deal with it correctly? Here I'm referring to pieces of wisdom, like it's harder to read longer lines (that's why newspapers use columns) -- but then, width should be given using em and ex.

• Are you forced by some old guidelines? In the dark old age of HTML, people did a lot of things wrong; now everybody finally uses CSS, but perhaps this one just sticked.

• Or are you like me, wondering why everybody is doing it "wrong"?

To illustrate the issue, I want to give screenshots of negative examples first:

• StackOverflow (here I can't even see what would make it any hard to fix it)
• Filmstarts (a german website which renders itself unreadable-if I don't take a reading-glass with me)

And here is a positive example. It looks like a typical fixed with site (even with transparent borders), but it is not:

Website on Wiki software -- associated Forums

What do you think?

Update: Related questions: this one and that one.

Answer 1

And here, as expected, comes the usual canard: “long lines are too hard to read”.

[Citation needed], folks.

See http://webusability.com/article_line_length_12_2002.htm for a summary of actual research in this area. A number of these, plus http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/72/LineLength.asp, find that although users express a preference for moderate line lengths, reading speeds do not sharply drop off with ‘long’ lines; in fact many show increased speeds with the longer settings.

As long as it's not ridiculously long, and taking care to use a decent amount of leading, long lines are not generally a real issue at today's typical browser widths and default font sizes. (If you're one of those designers that loves to use teeny-tiny type for everything, it could be an issue, but then you're already making it impossible to read with the flyspeck text. Stop it!)

So as it's only an option of user preference that prefers medium-short lines, let us users decide how much screen space we want to give the web site to get our work done. We're the ones best-equipped to know. If you decide you know definitively best you're likely to waste space, or, if you guessed too long, make us scroll back and forth sideways to read the text — and that really is a readability nightmare.

If you want to protect us from ourselves, you can compromise by specifying a min-width and max-width in ‘em’ units so that the page is responsive to liquid layout, but doesn't get stretched to extremes.

But otherwise, the best reason to design fixed-width is indeed that it is easier, especially for someone with a fixed-2D-grid view of the world and static visual-design tools like Photoshop.

Answer 2

It's already a pain to make a website that renders correctly across all popular browsers; if you also want it to render correctly at all text sizes, it's quite a lot of work. A lot of web developers design their sites for the default font size and try to support fonts that are either a little bit larger or a little bit smaller. (You might be interested in this dated but relevant piece from Jakob Nielsen.)

As for fixed-width sites, it's hard to say. Personally, I suspect that a lot of web designers just like to feel like they have a lot of control over their look and feel, and think the site looks "ugly" when you stretch it too far, so they don't let you do it. Probably not wise, but there you go.