Link: http://alistapart.com/article/fluidgrids/

Ten years ago, circa 2004, it felt like the web had found its rut and would never get out: XML and XHTML had failed to fix the browser-incompatibility mess, the horrid Internet Explorer had achieved almost total browser-market dominance, and web designers were focussing on animated pre-rolls and big screens. Even in 2009, when the rise of mobile was impossible to ignore, Ethan Marcotte still sounded like an Isaiah shouting from the wilderness when he pleaded with us to think differently:

Instead of exploring the benefits of flexible web design, we rely on a little white lie: “minimum screen resolution.” These three words contain a powerful magic, under the cover of which we churn out fixed-width layout after fixed-width layout, perhaps revisiting a design every few years to “bump up” the width once it’s judged safe enough to do so. “Minimum screen resolution” lets us design for a contrived subset of users who see our design as god and Photoshop intended.

It turns out that we weren’t at the end of web history, but just finishing the first act. After a decade-long intermission of stagnation, things started changing even faster than they had in the optimistic early days of the mid 1990s. IE has become so irrelevant that it’s barely necessary to test against it any more (unless your audience is big industry or government office workers using obsolescent desktop computers), HTML5 and CSS3 have exploded, the Javascript ecosystem has matured, the majority of page views happen on small-screen mobile devices, and those devices ensure that most users always have the latest version of their browsers (a vain hope in 2004 or 2009).

Five years after Marcotte’s article, any so-called web designer proposing to work with a fixed “minimum screen resolution” would … and should … be fired.

Except maybe in government and big industry.