The always-fantastic Coding Horror blog discusses Edward Tufte and his crusade for information density:

These days, you rarely see screens packed densely with content and hundreds of links, but that's what Tufte seems to be asking for. We even make fun of the Yahoo home page because it has become so dense over time. Are we wrong, and Tufte is right? Average display resolutions haven't increased that much between 1996 and 2006; we went from 800x600 to 1280x1024 or thereabouts. And we have the RGB magic of ClearType which increases effective horizontal resolution by about 3x.