Unlike fonts, Whitespace not easily user adjustible.

And I find it particularly that shrinking fonts to fit dialogs onto a 1024x600 netbook screen has little effect. Shrinking my fonts down from 12 pixels to an almost unreadable 6 pixels doesn't even come close to halving the size of the dialogs because it does nothing about the vast seas of white space that surround each line of text.

It is kind of silly that I upgraded my netbook to one with 768 pixels, not some much because my eyes can tell the difference on a 10" screen, but because it allows me to shrink the otherwise unshrinkable whitespace. I did a mockup [1] demonstrating that it should be possible to have usable buttons (etc) in as little as 11 vertical pixels including white space. If had the option of shrinking dialogs down that small even the 480 pixel screen on the original Eeepc would start being usable for most applications.

[1] http://dansted.co.cc/bits/11px_button.png