One interesting thing I noticed with the recent redesign of CNN.com is their use of more screen real estate. This suggests that a major shift is underway with users and their supported screen resolutions.

CNN.com [3] had been set to convenience users who had their monitors running at 800x600. In the early days of the web and for the last number of years, this has worked fine. A majority of consumer and corporate desktops were set to this by default. But increasingly, as more and more users have udgraded their hardware (both with higher-powered video cards and better displays), it appears the norm has now become 1024x768.

To confirm my hunch, I visited one of the foremost authorities on web user statistics - the W3Schools.com Browser Statistics Page [4]. Although their stats come with a very clear disclaimer, noteably that 'You cannot - as a web developer - rely only on statistics. Statistics can often be misleading. Global averages may not always be relevant to your web site. Different sites attract different audiences. Some web sites attract professional developers using professional hardware, other sites attract hobbyists using older low spec computers', it still suggests a lot to consider when building and maintaining a site.

Since clients often confuse monitor size with available 'screen real estate', it's nice to have the stats to refer to.

A key point in these statistics, however, is that W3Schools measures and samples only visitors to its own site, and their statistics cannot reliably be extropolated on a global basis. And because their visitors are mainly comprised of web workers and professionals, some of their stats (especially pertaining to Javascript and user-agent type) may be a bit skewed. Either way, it does give you a good glimpse.

One thing also to consider as far as what format and screen resolution to support is there are work arounds. For instance, liquid-based design conforms to nearly any size. Its drawback is the difficulty in maintaining a 'tight design'. Sites utilizing it take longer to construct and the conceptual methophor changes dramatically. It's also tricky to implement due to limitations/differences in browser implementations of standards, especially CSS.

In the future, browser support for the standards should become more consistent. While this should make implementation easier, coming up with workable concepts will still be a challenge.

Another path to mediate screen resolution is a growing trend of dynamic resolution-dependant layouts [5]. This essentially combines three existing technologies: javascript, CSS and the Document Object Model (DOM). Basically, the Javascript samples the user's agent or browser, gets its screen resolution and them adjust the CSS dynamically. All of it happens on page load. It's more work and requires scripting skills and knowlegdge of the DOM.