I like that design, but like Rick I'd like to note that those sites are very slow on my poor laptop. Especially, but not only, scrolling. Specs: 750 Mhz, Win2k, Firefox 1.0.4.
This seems to be caused by the fixed header and footer boxes: I copied the page locally and removed all "position: fixed;" lines from the css (and divs extra1 and extra2 from the html), which made the page much faster to scroll.
Note: that test was performed using
http://www.shell.linux.se/edev/design/codeblocks1/, which was the latest version at the time. The newer ones are still slow to scroll though, and I imagine for the same reason.
So far I prefer 2c, but could you please make the header and footer boxes scroll with the rest of the page instead of being "position: fixed"? That would improve it a lot on those with computers of the slower variety
.