XHTML and Frames

  I am very interested in how frames are going to work in the proposed
XHTML specification.  One of the things that is coming to light is that
with new portal implementations coming out that are using a multitude
of server-side technologies to gain access to enterprise data, there is
a current practice of making continual round-trips to the server to
pick up data and continuous reloading of pages.  This makes for a very
annoying user experience and results in unnecessary network traffic as
well as in poor performance especially over dialup connections. 
Additionally, all client-side technologies such as applets, DHTML,
javascript, Flash, SVG, etc. are continually having their context
destroyed and recreated with the constant page reloading.  This
essentially renders many client-side technologies virtually useless in
portals.  The way that this ties into frames is that the only current
way of loading a section of a page without causing client-side
technologies to lose their contexts (think of an embedded media player
playing a video) is to access all server-side data via frames so that
the main outer page DOM is maintained and therefore the client-side
technologies contexts are preserved.  What is important here is the
capability of dynamically loading new source into a frame in the
browser using a scripting language such as javascript must be provided.
 Portal portlets which are used to access server-side data can then be
implemented as frames and controlled individually while client-side
technologies maintain their contexts.  So for example a media player
portlet can play continuously while other portlets load in new content.
 This allows far less traffic to traverse the network and allows for a
much richer, more responsive user experience on portal sites.  Please
take this into consideration when specifying frame behavior in XHTML.

Thank you,
Gerry Reno


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Received on Thursday, 7 August 2003 00:04:43 UTC