Nobody ever tries such crazy things anymore. In the end some people actually rather like the panaromic effect that you get with a side scrolling website. It all comes down to what works for you. For example if I wanted to make a graphical timeline of events, it looks more natural to orient the timeline horizontally. Thus a side scrolling site becomes useful.
Horizontal orientation gives one a sense of chonology.
There are some setbacks to side scrolling websites from the webmaster's perspective. The main one is that it's much more complex to create and maintain than a vertically oriented site. This is because you have to use tables within tables, which can be confusing to work with. It helps to use a dynmaic website generation tool to calculate the tables for you like a CGI script or PHP , which is what I use.