How can I link to a specific content page inside a frameset?

[Bostonrose]

Im responsible for maintaining a web site that is still using frames and I'm not at all familiar with frames so I'm hoping someone here can help. We have a need for another web site to be able to link to a specific html page on our site. When I test this with just the web site name href="www.website/HTMLPage.html" , I get the page, but the frame around it is not there. Since the outside frame contains all the navigation, this is obviously a problem. Is there a way around this? Thanks, Bostonrose

[shanz]

Make sure your link goes to the frameset of the site and not a page of content.

The frameset will be a shorter document that has links that look like
<frameset rows="*,25" frameborder="NO" border="0" framespacing="0">

Shanz

[Dreamquick]

Short answer is no, because that is the way a frameset works, the frameset is a page which then puts other pages into frames. If you access those pages independently then yes you will see just the page because that is what you asked for.

The long answer is yes it is possible to force a frameset around a page which is not already framed using javascript or server-side script but it is messy, lots of people don't like it and it requires a lot of work (especially to make sure the frameset uses the page the user wanted and not the default page). Not to mention that a search engine will not be able to understand the purpose behind the javascript or any frames, and so will be limited to crawling the pages without any kind of navigation that does not physically appear on the page.

Somewhere in between you have answers such as including a link to reframe the site if the user want to, or simply adding appropriate links to allow the user access to a basic set of site navigation.

- Tony

[shanz]

If you make the page of content you want the link to go to a frameset as well then it can work.

So if you have a file called index which is your main frameset, then simply create an file called index2 which is a second identical frameset with the page of content you are after as default.

I generally agree with dreamquick though that any solution is a bodge.

Shanz

[Sinner_G]

If it is only for that one other website (or basically sites you can tell where to link to), I would suggest linking to the frameset and not the content frame.

The javascript solution was described here [webmasterworld.com] by Tedster in message 21.

[Bostonrose]

Thanks everyone for the suggestions, since this is just one situation and will only be for about 2 months, I think I will use the quick and dirty of creating a second frameset page that goes directly to the content page I want them to get to. Bostonrose