What should be the width (in % or pixels) of the master page and why? [closed]

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I see some web pages are centered (like stackoverflow.com) in the middle while others occupy the whole screen (yahoo.com).

In some books it's said that the width must be 720 pixels,

but what should the width be and why?

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The latest trend is Responsive Web Design, which says that you should make your page resize to fit the browser window, whether on a desktop or a mobile phone, by dynamically changing the page layout. That gets great results, but takes extra effort.

If you want to use a fixed width you could ask, what is the most useful width to use? The 960 Grid System says to use a width of 960, since it is easy to divide into evenly spaced columns. It is a flexible width to pick because, "960 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 32, 40, 48, 60, 64, 80, 96, 120, 160, 192, 240, 320 and 480."

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There is not hard value that you must use, but values between 700 and 780 are used a lot. Reason for this is that it will fit on most devices. Old computers running on a 800x600 resolution and the iPad with 768x1024 (when standing in portrait) will all be able to display a page with a width of 720px, including some margin, borders, scrollbar etc. So it's a good choice.

Another reason is that a too large width will make your texts harder too read. Lines that are too long are just harder to read. An example is Wikipedia, which uses the full width of the screen. When you're reading those pages on a 1920x* resolution, you really have to move your head from left to right to read those sentences.

I think the best solution would be to make a design that renders a maximum text width of about 720px (= about 60 to 80 characters in a normal font), but uses the whole width of the screen by rendering multiple columns, or moving inline images to the sideline when there is enough space.

But these kind of flexible markup is a lot harder to build, so most often pages are just fixed width.