Dan “Bulletproof” Cederholm launched a re-align of his blog and portfolio site, SimpleBits, this week — you can read his write-up here. It’s an elastic layout, meaning that the dimensions of the columns are specified in EMs and grow wider and narrower as the text is resized.

What is interesting is that Dan has not set a max-width on the site as a whole. Without max-width, an EM-based layout will simply keep on expanding as you bump up the text size — at 1024×768, SimpleBits will display a horizontal scrollbar at just one notch above the default font-size (on my machine anyway, YMMV). Dan says, “That’s OK. Wide is the new drop shadow.” but what do you think?

Should an EM-based layout sacrifice positioning to avoid overflowing the browser viewport? Or should the grid be maintained at all costs? Comments are open.

Read More At: http://www.digital-web.com/news/2008/02/Talking_Point_EM_based_grids_and_max_width