Why in this day and age is 800x600...

[Technical Ben]

the default size of a website? Just looked at a few I use and noticed with my widescreen monitor, the sites either bunch up to the left half only, or just go down the middle. I have to read tiny little pages.

Why, in this day and age, considering websites are dynamic content, do they not just automatically scale (either aspect keeping, or stretching out). Why?

Don't get me started on sites made for tablets that require infinite down or right scrolling. 

[pctech]

Because the designer has chosen to fix the size to ensure a consistent experience rather than relying on the client to render it as it sees fit.

Although my monitor and card support full HD I use 1280 x 720 to make text easier to read, what have you got to say about that eh Mr Widescreen?

[Technical Ben]

That's ok, it's a widescreen format. Though I find the pixel blurring for non-native images worse than the text size.

As said, it's mostly vector images and not pixels these days. Do it boggles my mind why it does not automatically scale. It should render the text the same size on any screen resolution (above 800 that is, as below it would not be readable, but saying that, some software does).

[nowster]

More annoying on a small laptop or mobile phone are sites that are considerably wider than the screen.

[pctech]

Yep, I don't bother browsing on my mobile as its too frustrating.

[zappaDPJ]

You have no idea how topical this conversation is but the other IDNetter's admins will

In a nutshell, everything mentioned here would be covered by a 'responsive design'. What is responsive design? Apart from being something that every single website should use it is a design approach aimed at building sites to provide an optimal viewing experience across a wide range of devices. Responsive design adapts the site layout to the viewing environment by using fluid, proportion-based grids, flexible images and CSS3 media queries.

To demonstrate the advantages of a responsive design here's a couple of examples. Increase/ decrease your browser window size.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/
http://xenforo.com/community/

As you can see both sites adjust to suit the viewing environment which means and end to resizing, panning, and scrolling.

[Technical Ben]

More annoying on a small laptop or mobile phone are sites that are considerably wider than the screen.

I use "mobile view" mode in Opera (should be available for 99% of phones out there), and it re-sizes automatically and works on most sites. But then again, the size of phone screens is never going to become universally useable without 1) accessibility and 2) automatically scaling sites. But there is not much you can do with the smaller pixel count screens. The larger ones though can be easily supported.

I've come up with a possible solution. It's an obvious one. What do you do with double the space and Windows tilling. (Ok, I admit, I surf 2 sites at a time quite often. So I can watch youtube, read wiki, post in the forum... wait, that's 3 sites... ok, I've done that too with dual screens!)

PS, and the best example of adaptive design in on XKCD (as most geek programming jokes are). They set one webcomic page up to adapt to every device you can use. It changes the resolution automatically and names the device. They even cover things that probably only had a release of 100 or so devices (probably works on the Apple Pipin etc ). It became a game to find the different settings they had accounted for.

Found it. It apparently checked things like mobile phone carrier (just USA I guess) and displayed a comic noting of the signal dropping. http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1037:_Umwelt