screen width 640 or 800?

What is the screen width in web design point of view
Should it be 640 or 800 or flexible?

e.g. this site have 640 width and claim it can be viewed by anybrowser[1] http://hot-things.net/


[1] http://www.anybrowser.org/

I may have misunderstood your question; if so, forgive me.

If you're designing a web page, I think it's easier and best to keep it at a 640 pixel width. If you go beyond that, then anyone with their screen resolution set to 640 will have to scroll vertically and that can be annoying. I've seen a lot of great sites (including my own!) that stick to 640 and just expand information down. Yeah, you still have to scroll, but you're scrolling down. It's like reading a book. Imagine if you had to turn the page just to read the second-half of a line and then turn the page back to read the following line?

Instead of specifying pixels, you could use percentages such as in tables. But, I find that can alter your images a little making them skewed or stretched. Not pretty.

Hope this helps.

Tim