Did CNN.com widen its render width? It’s hard to tell, unless you compare it to sister/daughter site CNN/Money.
I took some screenshots and some measurements. Today’s CNN.com page is 878 pixels wide. CNN/Money is 770 pixels wide. Seven-seventy is logical for an 800×600 display, but 878 doesn’t appear to correspond to anything. This is the same intermediary conclusion I came to by eyeballing it.
This leads me to believe that the main story image was resized improperly, and is too big. (It measures in at 355 pixels wide.) Also, it appears that the “top stories other than THE top story” column is the same width as the “TOP top story” column. So let’s just assume that CNN.com’s CSS or script or whatever resizes the first column to fit the image, then resizes the second column to match the first column.
So the number of pixels over the norm the image goes — doubled — should give us the difference in width between today’s CNN.com and every other CNN.com. Working backwards:
878 – 770 = 108
108 / 2 = 54
355 – 54 = 301
round off one pixel for fudge: 300
So I’m thinking the main image is typically supposed to be 300 pixels wide, but something got messed up, and the whole page scaled up by double that amount.