To be fair, the belief is a little more that anything wider than 1024 is typically too wide. Find me a site that lets text run for even that long. Typically you box things in much more heavily.
Comfortable reading widths should use font-relative measurements, not pixel measurements. The various studies about readability talk about words per line, which depends on font-relative width. For instance, you might set a line width in em or ex.
On a 1080p or even 2160p TV, the text should absolutely go all the way across, using a large font readable from across a room. On a high-resolution tablet, the font should still likely go all the way across the screen in portrait mode, and most of the way across in landscape mode, even though either one likely has more than 1024 pixels. On a phone, the font likely should go all the way across the screen in either portrait or landscape mode.
Right, this is definitely the more correct way. I'm just saying that, by and large, many designers were not doing anything bad if they set a width for their design at 1024. It isn't that they were wrong or right. They were just using a simplification that largely worked.
That should really be the decision of the browser user, but sadly years of poor training has led far too many people to just maximize every window, no matter how big their screen is.
Poor training? Or could it, perhaps, be a conscious desire to be at least semi-modal? Unless I have physically separate screens, I much prefer to have a single, maximized application going on onscreen almost all of the time. That doesn't mean I want only one application running, but that I generally only want one occupying my attention at any given moment. (The very existence of "distraction-free writing" applications makes me believe I'm not alone here.)
Name it, I've used it. I prefer full-screen, one-task-at-a-time if I can have it, no matter what you may like. Neither side is wrong (or doing it wrong). I just don't want the stuff I'm not using right now to be there. Period.
Well, you're wrong in that you seem to think I was trying to convince you of something. I was just curious as to your setup, since my habits run similar.
Personally, I use ratpoison, typically with one window full-screen.
Many, many years (just about 30 of them, in fact) of people telling me I really, really want tiled or overlapping windows despite my protestations have conditioned me to expect it.
To an extent. Sites like bostonglobe (and google plus) take it to give more columns the wider you are.
This is no different than how newspapers are done. Just because you have a giant piece of paper doesn't mean you should let the text flow completely across it.
