Re: Frames - does anyone like them?

> No expert, but disagree. "Design question" is irrelevant to where
> frames belong. Document structure is itself a design of sorts. Frames
> are more structure than presentation, and different presentation
> styles can appear in different frames. Frames are not a style applied
> to content, but rather containers for different content. Frames do
> not belong in style sheets.
> 
> As a container, FRAME is a higher level of abstraction than BODY.
> NetScape did a logical thing in keeping them out of the BODY
> container, since they are in fact containers for other HTML
> documents.

One of the biggest problems that I have heard from the usability
people is that frames don't allow you to bookmark places very
well because each frame is an individual document, thus you can
get various combinations of documents. How are we going to deal
with the addressing issues?

I see the layout of the frames themselves as being a presentation issue
even though they are also a container. Even if you could bookmark the
URLs for all frames displayed in the window, you still need to retain
the positioning and sizing of the frames themselves somewhere.

It would be easy if you had all frames as fixed URLs except one.
Then you could define a frame style (the position and style and
fixed URLs) in the head of the main changing page and just tell
the browser which frame is the variable frame so that the browser
can bookmark it. However, if you have multiple variable frames,
it is going to be fun figuring out how to bookmark the unique
instance of frame x being URL y and frame z being URL w ad nauseum...

Mary Morris

Received on Thursday, 22 August 1996 17:49:08 UTC