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Yes, the title is correct, 900×1440: the resolution of a 19″ tall-screen long screen instead of a widescreen monitor.

That’s what I’d set up in my house when I bought the discount BenQ FP92W this weekend. The first thing I do when I brought it home is to remove the monitor stand and place the monitor against the wall vertically.

Why would I do that? Because, my parents are using that computer for web surfing and text processing; with a 19″ tall-screen long screen, an A4 sheet can be seen 1:1 without scrolling: a great perspective for PDF documents.

But when come to the webpages, there is a little difference than I expected: like A4s, most webpages are vertical, a tall-screen would effectively making the viewing area larger; but unlike A4s, width of the webpages are often fixed in pixels. See the problem is? 900 is smaller/shorter than the width of a common webpage design, which is 1024. In 900×1440, horizontal scrolls will pop out and make the things worse.

The whole story end up with one of my webdesign principles: Do not design webpages in fixed width; Not everyone likes to maximize their browser and browse with a 1024×768 screen; besides, if you are a pro-web standard designer, aim to design a web for everyone with every browser and device, your webpage on 176×208 (S60 mobile) should be as usable as on 1680×1050. Fixed width would either waste usable spaces or simply unusable.

Let’s go back to the tall-screen long screen thing. My plan would be perfect if I bought a 22″ monitor with desktop resolution 1050×1680. But 22″ is too big to see everything at once and they are not that affordable. I’m just nobody abut a poor student trying to get my parents comfort and productive when using computer; they are in a age that couldn’t sit in front of the computer too long; backache hurts.