What is the size limit for a Web page?

The short answer is, as small as possible.
The size (bytecount) of your page, including any images, determines how long it takes to download. The question really is, how long will people wait for the page to download and render? Obviously it depends on the speed of their connection. A computer on a 500k broadband line is going to download about ten times faster that one on a 56k dial-up. You don't need to worry too much about the broadband users, it's those folk using the 56k modems that you have to consider, there still are a lot of them. Research has shown that once you go over 10 seconds, people start to get fidgety and start moving off elsewhere. So, try to stay within the 50k/10 seconds mark.

What screen size should I design for?

The most common screen size is 800 x 600 pixels closely followed by the slightly larger 1024 x 768 – according to TheCounter.com, so you should try to keep the main parts of your page within a width of about 720-760 pixels. This browser grid shows the working areas although the stats are now out of date. aving said that, increasingly more people are using handheld devices to access the web. A typical PDA has a screen resolution of about 240 x 320 (HP iPAQ) to 320 x 480 (Sony Clié). If you want people to access your pages with such devices, you have to take those smaller resolutions into account and design flexible layouts using percentages rather than pixels for all your layout elements and type sizes.

What's wrong with using tables for layout?

Most sites still use tables for Web page layouts. They are easy to understand and fairly predictable but their use for laying out a page is now frowned upon. Various reasons are cited for not using tables for layout – most often to do with the complexity of the markup and the accessibility of the content. Where these reasons are not unimportant, I think the best reason is that they are so limiting. The preferred alternative, of course, is CSS-P, which until recently has been reasonably well supported in browsers but poorly in the popular WYSIWYG editors. That's changing fast now that the two leading editors, Dreamweaver and GoLive, have been updated to take CSS-P seriously.

Do I still have to use the 'Web Safe' palette?

A few years ago, when most monitors used 256 colors, it was important to use the Web Safe palette to avoid nasty dithering. Now that nearly everyone has monitors that can display thousands or millions of colors, the Web palette is not so relevant. In fact, on screens that only have 16-bit color, the Web Safe colors are not 'safe' anyway, and dither – although you would have to look pretty close to notice. I still use the Web Safe palette, partly out of habit and partly due to the fact that I haven't found a better one. Choosing colors from a palette is much easier than 'mixing' them from raw RGB values – but there is nothing to stop you from 'tweaking' those colours if you want them darker, lighter or shifted in tone. A palette is just a convenient starting point that provides a more manageable number of choices that you can later expand upon.

Why can't I use on my Web pages?

This question comes up frequently from newbies. You can use whatever font you like on your Web pages but, as I mentioned above, HTML can only provide the name of the font, it can't describe the character shapes. If the person viewing your page doesn't have that font installed on their computer, they can't possibly see it because there is no outline description to draw the shape of the font. That's why, in Web design, you have to specify a range of fonts. For instance, if my font spec was 'Futura, Geneva, Arial, sans-serif', very few people would see my first choice, Futura as it is not a commonly installed font so the browser jumps to the next one. Geneva is common on Macs, so Mac users will see the text in that font. Arial, is common on Macs and PCs but because I have put Geneva in front of Arial, it takes precedence on Macs. PC owners will see the Arial. San-serif is a 'catch-all' for computers that don't have any of the preceding fonts installed and displays whatever the default sans-serif font is for the system. As the Web is now accessible from PDAs, mobile phones and other non-computer devices, the incidence of 'oddball', less common, typefaces will only increase. If you do want to use a specific font for items like logos, menu buttons or headlines, you can make a GIF file of the type set in a graphics editor but you should remember to echo the words in the image's 'alt' attribute so that the words are available for screen reading programs and search engine robots.