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I'm new to Web page design and I'm having a problem with iframe tags.
I design on a Mac and my friends on PC tell me that they can't see the entire height of the iframes I'm using. Width is okay.
I did a search on the forums and found two posts. The first suggested using a Java script, though that appeared to be related to screen size / resolution. The second suggested something called an ilayer tag to make PC-based iframe tags more compatible with Macs. Would that work in reverse?
I prefer to not have to set the height of the iframes by hand because the whole reason I'm using iframes is to carry fluid content over a number of pages without having to update each page every time I change the source files.
I'm working primarily with IE.
Any assistance you can offer is appreciated.
-markkrikava
The ilayer tag is specific to the Netscape 4 browser - no version of any other browser on any other platform supports it. So that won't help you here.
Unfortunately I don't know what will help. It sound as though there is an issue relative to font sizes, or even the definition of pixels, cross platform. I know that many Macs have a native resolution of 72 px per inch where pcs commonly run at 96 px per inch. However, I thought the compatibility problems were worked out over recent years.
This might be pretty difficult to debug unless you can work with both platforms in front of you. Is there a cafe or an office supply store near you where you can do that?
You report and others like it have convinced me to leave iframes alone, no matter how promising they seem. It doesn't look like iframes will stay around for XHTML 2 anyway, and that's the way to the future. So I'm not going to get attached to a design method that I'll just need to let go of in a few years.
The W3C standards for the heights of various elements are sometimes very loose, so unless you specify a value for height, you're at the mercy of the differences among how the browsers render things on their own.
The only thing I could think of would be to use a more dynamic method of generating the <iframe> tag within the document. For example, you could use an external JavaScript or Server Side Includes. Both methods have drawbacks, but its the only fix I can see short of setting the height attribute on each <iframe> tag you use. Good luck!
I am not invested in any way to using iframes over another design / code option--it's just the one I found that appeared to meet my needs.
So perhaps the question I should be asking is: how can I best / most efficiently provide fluid content across a number of pages (that is, understandably, compatible across platforms, as well).
I want to be able to udate content on one page and have those changes appear on a dozen other pages.
Specifically, the iframes hold links to other areas of our site--some of which change regularly.
I don't know if it counts as 'promotion' since we're a non-profit and the site doesn't carry ads, but I've been creating samples at manifestonews.org/test5. The iframes flank each side of the content in nested tables. When it works correctly, it looks really snazzy and is easy to use.
I do have access to a place with both Macs and PCs, and that is my next stop if I can't find a fix / alternative via the forum.
Thanks again,
-markkrikava
