You've got to be kidding me. 540px is nothing! Just look around the internet and the average is probably 800 pixels wide.

I didn't say it was the most common width...

That's if the site has a limited width at all. I really disagree that 540 pixels is a good width.

Oh, I wasn't saying it should appear 540 pixels wide if your browser window happens to be wider than that. I was just saying that, as a good compromise between inclusiveness and ease of designing, the site should still be usable in a 540-pixel window without horizontal scrolling. Ideally, though this gets harder the more HTML gimmicks one uses, it should scale from 540 pixels all the way up to 1920 -- but making pages that look sensible wider than 1000 is difficult.

This BBS stays readable down to 540 pixels (unless someone writes a lot of monospaced text). So does Google. The news.bbc.co.uk story pages do too, though you can't see the links at the right. I guess it's a marketing call, really: whether you reckon you'll lose more readers by frustration at using your site, than you'd gain by using whatever funky layout somehow can't be written to be stretchy.

Peter