It's very hard to design resolution independent web sites, due to multiple browsers, especially with MS i.e. browser intentionally try to break compatibility.
Agreed. IE is evil. It makes it hard to use anything except Flash and similar. And the performance is awful. However, I have some hope that IE8 will be at least a little better.
I build websites and if people are using IE, I redirect them to download Firefox
Then you're loosing a significant part of your audience. If I was using IE (which I wouldn't), I wouldnt download Firefox just to view your site. Why do you except that people actually care?
It depends enormously on who your audience is. I work on a webapp that's used by companies to secure their networks. They are pretty amenable to changing browsers when, for example, Firefox and Chrome run Canvas-based graphics 30x faster than IE7.
On topic: If you design your site using em's and &'s instead of pixels, you can achieve an almost resolution independent site. There is the issue of images though, so you have to be careful and do plenty of testing.
True, it is possible to come close, but I do expect that in the somewhat near future, we'll see true resolution independence as a possibility, although most sites won't use it.
Opera had full page zoom for years, firefox has it for almost a year too. I didn't see any trend of "res independent website design" from designer side.
Most sites use tools which haven't exactly addressed resolution independence. What's possible is usually years ahead of what's done. Most of the Web 2.0 stuff would have worked pretty well years ago, but it took a while for tools to catch up.
To be honest, I fail to see how exactly res independent being important.
That's because you've grown up expecting to see more on a higher resolution screen. In general, this is a "paper" point of view and makes sense for a lot of things - the bigger the paper, the more you see. However, a lot of things look nicer with a TV sort of point of view - everyone sees the same things, but those with higher resolution or bigger screens see it all more easily. Clearly, there are limits - you just cannot use a 13" screen as well as a 30" one - but many webapps, for example, would appear better to users if the screenshots in the documentation looked the same as what they saw on their screens - whether they were on laptops or desktops.
Many technologies are converging to allow this.
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is
amazingly powerful - essentially, it gives you everything
Flash provides but in a text format, so, for example, you can include vector images as part of the page text - i.e., you could have words and pictures and animations and links and resolution independence without having to load more than one page. It's awesome, but it's still a red-headed stepchild in many browsers, and the tools don't support it well for websites.
Canvas-based stuff is supported by the
Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and allows vector graphics to be coded within GWT-based applications. This allows resolution independence to be more easily coded by Java developers. HTML standards continue to be refined, and browser support is converging nicely around the standards.
For amazon.com, there likely won't be much need for resolution independence. But for real browser-based applications, it's wonderful that the tools are finally starting to arrive.
