[DISCUSSION] Ten Years of TF.N: A Look Back at Web Designing

Well it's pretty obvious by looking at the original TFN main page that web sites weren't nearly as sophisticated back in 1998 as they are now. Drop a few gifs on a page, type a few lines, add some links, and you could call it a day. Even 5-7 years ago when flash wasn't widely used and people were still getting the hang of cascading style sheets and dynamic drop-down navigation menus, web design still seemed leaps and bounds ahead of that of the mid to late 90's.

The main thing I've seen a lot of in the last few years that maybe wasn't as much of a fad beforehand was the idea that a website needs to jam as much content as possible onto your screen at once. This usually means a fixed-width 1000-pixel wide box sitting in the middle of your screen regardless of your window size or screen resolution with a large chunk of that fixed size being taken up by banner ads. Sometime in 2004, TFN changed to a similar layout which is still in use today. While I can see the benefits of cramming all that content together (ease of navigation, less scrolling), I always preferred the old fluid layout: http://web.archive.org/web/20040612102923/http://theforce.net/

Ah, the fluid layout. The layout where everything has a chance to breathe, stretch out, and make use of all that whitespace. Is there a specific reason why (it seems) less and less sites are using fluid designs? Is it because today's coding and standards make it too hard to make a fluid layout work correctly in all browsers? Is it because webmasters are just too lazy to design a fluid- or even a minimum-width layout for their site? Or is it something else? (This forum, btw, still uses an endless array of nested tables to accomplish it's fluid layout. I cringe every time I read through the code. )

My biggest pet peave on the internet is trying to read an article on a website (like CNN) in a ~1000px fixed-width layout with a third of that space being hogged by a sidebar. Why do I, with a 1600x1200 display, have to suffer through that endless scrolling and tiny text? But I digress...

If you've made it this far through this post, you'll know that while I think the sophistication of web sites has come a long way, I think we still have a lot of room for improvement. The interesting thing is that it's not just one thing that could stand to improve, but just about every aspect of the internet. Everything could stand to improve from our favorite browsers, to W3C standards, to CSS and scripting, and even we the designers.

Anyway, that's my take. What does everyone else think?