Links do not open in target frame

[dumbo]

Newbie coming through! Can anyone help me concerning frames?
I understand that websites are better off without frames now, but for some reason I've tried them out on a site
<Sorry, no personal URLs. See TOS [webmasterworld.com]>

The site is divided into different file directories, and each index.html names correctly I think the frames. The framesets are divided into a header right across the 'top', and everything below that into a 'menu' column on the left and the rest is 'content'. The links in the 'menu' part of the frameset use the target attribute to specify that links should open in the 'content' part of the frameset (correctly I think).

Strangely the targets worked fine to start with and links opened in 'content', now they all spawn a new window in MSIE 5.5 & 6 and Netscape 4.7x (I haven't tested other browsers yet).

The DOCTYPE on all directories apart from the 'Links' directory is an xhtml 1.0 frameset & transitional doctype (they don't validate fully in fact) and because I thought this may be causing the problem I tried an HTML 4.01 frameset & transitional DOCTYPE on the 'Links' directory.

Because of this problem I commented out all links that target the 'content' frame in the menus for each frameset (i.e. the links that aren't meant to open a new window) and now only the 'Links' directory has such links available. You can see new windows appearing nevertheless if you use the menu on the 'links' frameset (they may open correctly to start with for you).

Does this sound familar to anyone?
The header 'top' uses SSI to import a standard header file and current date, the 'content' part SSI to import 'date last modified' and standard footer. Would SSI be causing the problem? Or the fact the pages don't fully validate? I've also tried using <base target="content"> in the head section of some of the 'links-content' pages with no luck. There is a bit of jscript used for 'mailto' links

Maybe I'd be better off just abandoning frames. I like the way the navigation is always present, though....
I'd be really grateful for any suggestions if anyone has them. All advice happily received, thanks. :-)

[edited by: tedster at 5:36 pm (utc) on Sep. 3, 2004]

[walrus]

I use the frameset doc type only for the index of the directories and the target files regular doc type.

What change did you make between the time they were working and stopped working?