Why aren

I mean they barely even sell 4:3 monitors anymore. I have a 22%26quot; widescreen, great for videos but its pointless for websites since websites are designed for 4:3 monitors I have about 40% of the monitor unused.



Because peoples eyes tire rapidly when they have to continuously sweep left to right horizontally over a large range. Very fatiguing to read text. Slow too.





The same reason that a letter on an standard 8.5x11 inch piece of paper is always written with the long side vertical.





Wide screen is good for video content and not much use for much else.


And even at that...too much video and TV content ends up letterboxed.




Backwards compatibility. Many 4:3 monitors are still in use these days. Plus modern widescreen LCD%26#039;s tend to have higher resolutions than the monitors of yesteryear. If you don%26#039;t like it, you can always align your windows side-by-side... People with 4:3 monitors with limited resolution at say 800x600 or 1024x768 can%26#039;t really do much to adjust the content of a window that%26#039;s designed for a 1280x800 monitor.




Web pages aren%26#039;t designed for any particular aspect ratio, most are solely designed for width. The limit on the length of a web page is usually how fast the page the page can load and the content for that particular page.





Web pages have to be designed to be assessable to a wide range of monitor resolutions, the standard monitor width until recently was 800 pixels, nowadays 1024 is the more standard screen width and so most sites are now designed for this, but even then, you%26#039;ll find the actual page width is narrower than this - usually not much more than 800 or 900 pixels.





Long lines of text are difficult to read so you%26#039;re unlikely to see many designers writing sites for wider screens anytime soon - especially as most people still use their computer monitors not TVs for viewing websites.




Good question. I%26#039;m only guessing here, but I%26#039;d say that whilst most new PCs come with widescreen monitors, the great majority in use are still 4:3. I%26#039;ve seen a few websites that fit the widescreen nicely, but I agree most still have a lot of spare space. I have a few websites myself and have only centered them so far....




It%26#039;s impossible to detect what monitor a computer is using, because if you used some kind of script for this on the website, then this would be illegal - infringing privacy or something.


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