Forum Moderators: phranque
But you want something that that is consistently spiderable by search engines, can be bookmarked by humans, and works with a vast range of browsers and adaptive technologies, avoid frames.
Google for frames suck.Tthe first few results should give you all the background,
Whether they are right or wrong depends on your circumstances.
Though, it'd be prudent to make the business case to use them before doing so on a site.
Cheers!
If they don't work well with search engines then it's probably not worth the time, right?
It depends of what you are trying to achieve. After all, the web started before search engines, so there are a great many sites -- many of them now classic role models -- that were published with no idea of the needs of search engines.
But if you want a visible and usable site, then either learn a lot about how to manage frames, or don't use them.
Or use them in specialised parts of your site where they might make sense for your application and audience.
If javascript is disabled, I fall back to using IFrames - the page looks the same but the navigation bar scrolls off.
My urls look entirely normal and it all works properly on IE, FF and Opera. The only problem I have is that to avoid scrollbar issues, IE prefers to be in quirks mode but this does not cause me great problems.
Of course, if { position:fixed } worked in IE, frames could be discarded entirely. In fact, it is possible to do this using some twisted CSS hacks. Indeed, you can produce spiral frames this way that cannot be achieved by normal means.
Kaled.
The use of frames has to have considerable payoff to overcome those difficulties. If you've done your cost benefit analysis and frames come out on top, use them. You are likely to be in a tiny minority; but right isn't to do with size.
SSI is server side technology. The client need never know you are using it. They just see the emitted HTML.
SSI and suchlike are a good step towards having a dynamic site. Usually a good step. But again, your own research will put a value to it for your situation.
SSO emitting frames would be as good or bad as frames alone, though.
SSI is a common, probably best, solution. Since their site was hosted by an organization that would not allow server side stuff, I wrote a simple VBA program that would run through the entire site and update pages. (I would guess that some WYSIWYG and HTML editors will provide this automatically).
The only reason I can think of to use frames is if you want part of the window to have its own scroll bars. But I can't think of any reason you would want that. So it seems to me that there is no reason to use frames and some reason to not use them.
The only reason I can think of to use frames is if you want part of the window to have its own scroll bars.
I'm baffled.......
You use frames if you want an area of the screen to be permanently visible - scrollbars are irrelevant unless there is insufficient space to display the required information.
If IE supported { position:fixed } as Firefox does (and Opera does, but badly) there would be no need to use frames. Since W3C thought to include { position:fixed } in CSS, presumably they see that there is a need for fixed elements.
Incidentally, the Plesk Control Panel appears to use frames (I haven't checked the source code). There is definitely a need for fixed elements, and frames are the only way to achieve this in a manner that works on all browsers without having to resort to serious CSS hacks.
Kaled.
