The March 3rd issue of A List Apart has a great article about fluid grids and how to use ems for positioning/layout. Though the article doesn’t contain any particularly new techniques, it’s a great overview of em-based design, and a good reminder about an important user-centric design principle. Ethan Marcotte, the article’s author, brings up a good point about the fallacy of a “minimum screen resolution”:
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?
