Yeah, frames are some sort of stage that web designers go through. Usually pretty early on. I think we had them here briefly, back in the very beginning. They sort of seem like a good idea in that you can keep one frame as your site navigation links, and then no matter where a user is on the site, the navigation options are always present.
The big downside (well, there are several, but the way I usually talk people out of wanting to do frames) is that as you move around the site (in one of the frames - usually the bigger one) the URL in the location field of your browser doesn't change. So it's impossible to bookmark anything except the front page of the site! On an ecommerce site this is death. If you want to send your friend a link directly to the product they want to buy you can't do it.
This completely breaks the model of the web, which is simply that each resource has a unique URL. On a framed site, every page will appear to have the same URL.
One curious thing is that I've noticed lots of old school geek science types use frames. Like, say, a guy from the Geneva high energy particle physics lab who built his web page in 1985 (and never updated) will often employ frames. So I think they used to be more common, at least among the kind of people who started the web. But in terms of HTML standards frames are completely deprecated. They work in most browsers (although not on a lot of mobile devices,) but it is no longer a valid part of HTML.
And sound. Don't get me started on sound. Grrrrr.
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The big downside (well, there are several, but the way I usually talk people out of wanting to do frames) is that as you move around the site (in one of the frames - usually the bigger one) the URL in the location field of your browser doesn't change. So it's impossible to bookmark anything except the front page of the site! On an ecommerce site this is death. If you want to send your friend a link directly to the product they want to buy you can't do it.
This completely breaks the model of the web, which is simply that each resource has a unique URL. On a framed site, every page will appear to have the same URL.
One curious thing is that I've noticed lots of old school geek science types use frames. Like, say, a guy from the Geneva high energy particle physics lab who built his web page in 1985 (and never updated) will often employ frames. So I think they used to be more common, at least among the kind of people who started the web. But in terms of HTML standards frames are completely deprecated. They work in most browsers (although not on a lot of mobile devices,) but it is no longer a valid part of HTML.
And sound. Don't get me started on sound. Grrrrr.
- jim 7-31-2003 9:55 pm