width of blog
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How can I insure that my blog fits the entire monitor screen regardless of the size of the monitor and the browser used?
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I think all of the themes here at wordpress.com are “fixed width”. In general for ease of reading, there is a maximum text area width, which most of the themes here at wordpress.com follow. If a text area is too wide, when a reader is moving from line to line, they can more easily get lost and get off a line or two.
To see what wordpress.com themes have the widest post areas, you can look here: http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/09/25/how-big-can-my-images-be/
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not all of the WP themes (including those installed on .com) are “fixed width” ones, there are a few with a so called ‘fluid layout’ layout where columns width set in % of the total available width (considering margins, of course).
such themes use exactly ‘the entire monitor screen regardless of the size of the monitor’.
and btw, so called ‘fixed width’ themes are actually not quite for readers easiness. fixed width layout is about ease of producing that themes for the theme makers, though.
this is rather a kind of an unpretentious approach to fit fixed (in pixels) blog layout into the max. possible screen width at fixed resolution. it’s usually used by some “web designers” who don’t bother themselves with how their theme will look being scaled up or down at another resolutions.
the biggest advantage of fixed width layout is that it gives those “designers” some fine control on it. however, fixed (in pixels) width, as rule, also determines fixed font height (also in pixels) of main text body as well, which in its turn may be a biggest disadvantage, but this time already for readers of the blog using such themes.
for example, fixed width themes could be looking pretty cool at 800×600, but at higher resoultions font size of the main text will be just tiny and unreadable (otherwise it’d be huge at 800×600). or, instead, they may be OK, let’s say, at 1024×768, but on a monitor with lower than that max. resolution users will have scroll such page horizontally, which is a totally anti-usable pattern.
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PS
web media is different to print media in many aspects (including comments editorial policy and such, btw) and page layout is definetely one of them.as you correctly mentioned above, for ease of reading, a column width is effectively determined by the certain number of the words per line. but as you may also probably know, on the print media those lines are typeset by the particular typeface of the particular fixed type height (in points, picas or other typographic units) and hence have a more or less constant (read fixed) number of words per line — no problems cause there’s a finite paper size, but there ain’t such thing as ‘paper resolution’ or PPI. not so on the web media: screen resolution and font face in use on a web page all of them may vary pretty much.
if a web page, constrained by the fixed (in pixels) width layout, wants to maintain this number, then it eventually sacrifices a comfortable for reading font size height (in both directions at diff. resolutions) or ease of the page navigation. this often makes such (numerous due to spreading of those themes) pages simply unreadable and/or unusable at all.
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