That's because you do not understand the benefits (and power) of
marketing, design, and layout.
Yes I do. But I have never understood how *broken* layout would impress
anybody. If 50% people gets pixel perfect layout, that means that 50% of
people *don't* get pixel perfect layout. And that usually means I get
broken layout, and I do define layout broken when some decorative lines
don't meet, when they should and viewing situation is about normal.
The very cool layout only has benefits when it actually works - if there
is flaw, it makes whole layout not cool. By designing with pixel perfect
assumption, you easily make your layout have ugly gap here and there or
scrollbars everywhere. With doing some compromises on pixel perfectness,
you can archive site where layout works perfectly (but not pixel
perfectly), in 90% of times.
The numbers might be 90% and 99% as well, I have no statistical proof.
But I think it is clear that flexible layout has bigger succes rate. (as
long as it is done right - just doing layout using CSS is no guarantee
of anything.)
You (seem to) believe that these are meaningless.
Strawman arguments are good when you can't think anything else? I belive
great deal on how design can change things. Good design creates image
that people behind know their stuff. If it is beutiful, they are
obviously creative. But if it breaks, well, nice try, but...
I know that you can't design website that don't have broken design with
using pixels as unit.
Things that make people come back to the official star wars site
(
www.starwars.com) are not the same things that will make people come
back to
www.dictionary.com.
Sure, but both cases, it has not much to do with layout... At least,
design of both sites sucks so badly...
The content is the reason they come back. If user knows alternative
source for content, with better layout, he propably uses it.
The goals of the sites are as different as
their needs. An all text star wars site is just as worthless as an eye
candy filled dictionary.com site.
There seems to be som sort of fixation among pixel perfect people that
they think all people that don't agree them would only use text for
everything etc.
The starwars site uses flash. So why not do it well, so that it fills
browser nicely. With flash, they should not limit themselves by bitmap
graphics.
Actually, site works in about 800 wide window just fine, when I force it
to fit it (Opera 8b3: Fit to width). There is some zooming artifacts, but
using vectors for fonts would take them away. And even as is it is much
better than scrolling horizontally. After all, I like to see whole site,
especially when it is designed the way it is.