RSS feedI love CSS Vault, I really do. The last six months they’ve really gone from strength to strength, and now people consider them the ultimate CSS gallery site.
But why does every single site in their gallery end up being 105.2 pixels wide? Well, I’m exaggerating ever so slightly, but the whole point of HTML is that the browser renders the site as it thinks it should look, and the user can adjust their window size to whatever they feel comfortable wth.
For example, I have my work machine set to 1600 wide, and all my browser windows are, you probably guessed it, 1600 wide. Want to know what a typical “fully CSS compliant” web site looks like on that kind of set up? Crap, basically. Imagine if you had a large six foot wide whiteboard to play with, but you were restricted to using only the middle 30cm or so.
Don’t get me wrong, all the sites in the CSS Vault gallery look absolutely fabulous, but why do they all have to be 98.4 (slightly exaggerated) pixels wide ?!
I figure the reason is that developers will always abuse what they’re given. Remember the IE custom support days, remember the table as layout hack days, and now remember the CSS as fixed layout days. A lot of work goes into these standards (HTML and CSS) to make them completely browser independant, or at least malleable enough for user personalisation, so why don’t web developers understand the spirit of the standards? Do they think every browser window on earth is either 640, 800 or 1024 pixels wide? I think I’ve seen browser windows in every single pixel size from 300 to 1600. That’s the reality I’m afraid, and forcing a 927 pixel wide window user into only seeing 800 wide is just plain stupid. It is the user for which the site exists, so why not do them a favour, and instead of showing off how talented graphic designers are and how ignorant they are about the actual site content, why not do something for their audience for a change?
My window is 1600 pixels wide, I do it for a reason, and if I see another web site which uses only a couple of hundred pixels, then claims to be super standards compliant, I’m gonna go nuts! In fact, I might even start a new CSS Vault, and call it Skinny Vault, with the URL www.useless.skinny.websites.com. Know of a useless skinny web site? Enter a comment on this post, and together we can rid the web of these graphical dunderheads once and for all.