COMMON WEB DESIGN MYTH: Expandable web design is best because it fills up the whole screen.
Just because you are able to make tables expand doesn't mean it's the best thing to do. Someone with a monitor set to a very large size would find your site very annoying if they had to try and read a column of text 12 inches wide. I leave web sites that do that because I can probably find the info somewhere else on the web that's easier to read.
Just because you have space available doesn't mean you need to use it all. It's a basic graphic design principle that a lot of web people without graphic design training aren't aware of. The worst culprates of this are car dealership newspaper ads, they cram as much as they can they can in the space they have and I loath the day I have to look for another car because of it. A lot of comunity web sites that use pre-made templates commit this tragic mostake as well.
I design my web sites to fill up an 800x600 monitor and they are fixed at that size, because it's a good column size for readability.
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