Do you think a fluid website should have limits for its width?

Question

Do you think a fluid website should have limits for its width (such as min-width and max-width, and hacks for IE)? Well, that's because screen resolutions may be too high which is not that good for reading text contents. What'd you say?

Answer 1

This is not really programming related. But take this is site an example. Does it look fluid to you? And it has fixed width... I think it depends on the site, it needs to be decided looking at the characteristics and outcome.

Answer 2

Yes, I think there's often a good case for max-width.

Making a website hugely wide is likely to reduce its readability due to over-long text lines - not in all cases, but in many.

And whether people like it or not, achieving a truly flexible layout, within the constraints of the information you're presenting and its visual design, can be unreasonably difficult. max-width can help to reach a compromise.

My site here: http://entrian.com/source-search does exactly what you describe, and IMHO it's a good compromise between flexibility in a narrow browser and readability in a wide one.

Answer 3

There are upper and lower limits for the length of a line of text, after which it becomes very hard to read for the average user. This post talks about it in depth, but the answer seems to be that anything over 100 characters per line should be avoided.

As long as you stay within these limits I would say that you don't need to cap the width of the site, just individual text sections. As usual the disclaimer of 'it depends on what you are trying to achieve' will apply.