I personally wouldn’t opt for a 12″ eee pc, sure my first laptop was a 12″, I’d feel like I was going backwards!

The whole notion of the eee PC appeals to me for when I’m on the road. But I merely want it to be something I can access the internet with and collect emails when I’m on the road. I know I could just get a blackberry, but I like the idea of only collecting emails when I decide, not when dictated to by a phone.

Vertical scrolling is less painful but still not ideal .. for just browsing, OK, but think of any input form or edit window where the action buttons are missing – some at the top, others at the bottom, you keep on scrolling forever.

That said, I would not go backwords – expect netbook makers t wake up soon. Not even the current 9″ or 10″-ers do it, they all stop at 600 vertical resolution. The only exception is the 12″ Dell, but it is rendered slow by Vista.

Still, I am convinced we’ll be seeing 10″ (12″) netbooks soon with 800 vertical res.

In my opinion every element of the sites content should be accessible to all without the need to scroll horizontally.

By supplementary content, I mean content that is not part of the main body of content. For example if you resize this page to ~800px wide then you can still read the blog post perfectly, you will only need to scroll horizontally if you want to get to categories or archive months. In my opinion that is perfectly acceptable for 20% of users. If they need to scroll just to continue reading a sentence then yes, it’s a problem.

Also in an ideal world the different stylesheets for the different resolutions are a great idea. But it’s convincing the client that it’s worthwhile to do this, for a little extra money.

@ Dave, well 20% of people would have difficulty viewing your website and that for me is just too large a risk to take when you can just as easily create designs that fit nicely into all resolutions without any issues.

In relation to supplementary content, I would have a different opinion on that. If it’s supplemnetary why is it there at all???

I can see this point of view it we are talking about banners or something like that. But in reality to get the best return from your website, all your content is important, so you need to maximise the amount of people that can see it as you had envisaged. They shouldn’t for example, have to scroll across to see your call to actions.

On an average site you will find that 80% of website visitors will have a browser width of >1000px. We found this out when collating data from FoldSpy: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/11/23/screen-resolutions-and-better-user-experience/

And it’s not like you are losing the other 20% it’s just that they will get a horizontal scrollbar. Most smart web designers will use content that is grater than 800px from the left margin for supplementary content only (i.e.. right sidebar).