Vent: Screen shapes/site shapes

A question about : Vent: Screen shapes/site shapes

Why is it that hardware manufacturers seem to insist the we get ever wider monitor. laptop, and tablet screens at the same time as most sites seem to think it's a good idea to display as a thin ribbon down the middle?

What is worse is that the site designers are so incompetent that even on a tablet held vertically the STILL manage to leave blank space down the sides!

The original widescreen format was fine but stop ramming ever more panoramic shapes down out throats. I've yet to meet anyone who actually thinks these ultrawide screens are a good idea for general compute activities.

Best answers:

• Site designers will develop their site to cater for all major device types.
  As you've said in your post there are lots of different sizes of screen and it will be impossible for a website to cater for all devices that may browse it.
• I don't understand the phone/tablet argument anyway as unlike laptops and desktops they can operate in either landscape or portrait.
• Like this, you mean? Not sure I'd want the forum to expand to the edges, I'd get get a crick in my neck...
• There seems to be a little confusion in this thread - for clarity...
  HTML was designed as a markup language for CONTENT not FORMATTING. This was back when we used text-based browsers like Lynx. The web server had no idea what the display device size, platform, resolution, etc was - the rendering of the file was the responsibility of the client (browser) AND STILL IS. Graphical browsers like Mosaic and later Netscape came onto the scene, so it became possible for them to automatically request and display an image rather than just allowing you to download a link. This made the web more engaging, but people played around with more and more extensions - tables became used for layout of images, text was coloured, flashing, scrolling. Background images were introduced. All of this has to sell be back-compatible with those text browsers because the server doesn't know anything much about the client.
  Some clever people saw that HTML itself was getting overloaded with design element descriptors, so managed to give them off into CSS (Cascading Style Sheets - cascading because they had an order of precedence if in collision). The more visual toys designers had, the more they wanted to decide what was good for us and what wasn't. They knew that many monitors at the time were at most 800px wide, so in an attempt to impose their design choices, they made the site content 800px wide (using tables or CSS, takes took a long time to deprecate) regardless of the myriad browsers who were going to render it. This is absolutely against the spirit of HTML which was to mark up text and allow the browser to do the rendering. It's hung over ever since, some idiots thinking it's the 'right' way to do it, and every kid with a computer calling himself a 'web designer' didn't help (incidentally, any Muppet with a laptop now sells SEO snake oil instead, but same bottom-feeders).
  All the extra stuff added in (JavaScript, for instance, but there's a lot more) meant browsers had to try to cope with a bizarre range of designs, by all skill levels of designer. Browsers had to become very tolerant for ugly HTML (ever seen what MS Word 'export to HTML' used to make? Ewww!) and in doing so, became more compliant, so we get stupid layouts that don't reflow for different resolutions even though that's been part of HTML since CERN days.
  The good news is that ultimately sites must be back-compatible with those old text browsers. Some will degrade nicely (skilled developers), most will look like a dogs dinner, some fail to work at all. The server still (most of the time) doesn't know about the browser and device doing the rendering, so the resulting HTML can be fun to play with using 'Examine Element' or the web developers toolkit toolbar - in almost all cases you can find the offending table or bad CSS constricting the site content to 800px, and nuke it - the browser will very happily reflow the page and text and the site still looks just fine. Limiting content width becomes even stupider when people need to increase the font size to read it - some sites will go so far as to end up with a vertical stripe of single words with most of the screen real-estate wasted.
  Good developers who want rich experience websites but don't want to constrain their users unnecessarily will be less controlling, maybe use percentage/relative positioning instead of absolute. The BBC iPlayer site is an example of a site that renders differently on different devices by allowing the device dimensions to determine the layout of the content whilst still providing a rich environment.
  In short, OP, it's because companies and designers think they should override the basic functionality of HTML through misplaced self-importance and arrogance. There is no technical reason why it should be.