I have an older system and I still use a 800x600 resolution. Also, according to http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp a lot of other people do. I don't think you should force a certain resolution by requiring the tables to be a certain width. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
marduk - opinions? It's definitely a balance between offering the necessary information in a presentable format for the majority of our users vs. ensuring a minority of our users can still view the information as well.
I follow the same style as the main site (www.gentoo.org). None of the table or cell widths are hard-coded. They are all percentages. The only sizes that are hard-coded are 1 pixel borders and padding. But usually the padding is in em units, which are percentages of font size. The left column will not scale because of the Gentoo logo image. The main site has this same limitation. The middle column scales, but is limited do to the table with the different platform avalabilities. It pretty much has a fixed minimum size because the are all one-word headings and thus don't wrap (but if you make your relative font size smaller in the browser (zoom out), it will scale with the font size. The right column has a minimum length because of the same images used in the main site. So the short answer is it can't be made any lower resolution friendly than it already is without removing the images and thus changing the look/feel from the main site. And I can hard-code font sizes, which will no doubt anger the higher resolution folks.
The page is a lot more readable now (in 800x600 at least). You removed the extra spacing around the headings right? I hope I'm not seeing things. :)
I removed the padding in the archlist. It wasn't necessary since the table width is 100% and so the browser will pad dynamically. I also removed the padding in the headings, but IMO it makes it look worse and doesn't really do anything to help lower res screens.
Well... now I'm able to see the whole middle column in the window witout having to scroll horizontally. I still have to scroll to see the right column, but I only have to do this if I want to search for a package and not all the time. I don't know how it looks in other resolutions, but I wouldn't say it looks worse in 800x600. It just looks a little bit squished, which depending on your point of view might mean worse. :) It doesn't bother me though, however, you should do whatever you feel it's best. I'd love it to remain the way it is now, but if you decide against it then I'll just have to live with it.