The philosophy is that you can't predict the user's setup so you want to make your design as adaptive as possible in order to increase the user experience. A fluid layout puts the control of the design in the user's hands.

There are 2 main faults with fluid design. One is that if someone has a very large/small screen or resolution your site can appear "wonky" - extremely long/short lines of text and distorted containers. The second is that fluid design makes it extremely hard to use background images because of container distortion. They require vast amounts of testing in order to function properly - if at all. In the examples above none of the sites use background images extensively - which severely limits your design creativity.

HYBRID/ELASTIC

A new design not mentioned in the title goes by several names and is basically a hybrid of the two. It uses min and max width (using javascript for IE6) to try and get the best of both worlds. Basically it defines a range of values in which the design can flow - so that you still have some control over the design (like fixed) but users with larger screens/resolutions can expand the width somewhat. 456 Berea St and Digg use something along these lines.

The main benefit of hybrid/elastic is that it gets some of the benefits of both fixed and fluid - users and designers split control over the design. It's main fault is that like any hybrid it doesn't do either of those things as well as the original.

CONCLUSION

If you haven't figured it out by now, there is no right or wrong answer. The correct choice depends on the purpose of your site and your design preferences. The sad fact is that any choice you make is going to alienate some user. The old saying is that "You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time."

Typically if you have a site with shorter blocks of text and/or you are more Web 2.0 you lean towards a fluid design - utilizing large font sizes to lower the impact of some of it's faults. If you have a site with long blocks of text - like a news or article/blog based site - then you lean towards a fixed width design.

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