Re: Frame document structure (fwd)

\\ Once upon a time Stephanos Piperoglou shaped the electrons to say...
\\ >On Sat, 28 Aug 1976, Walter Ian Kaye wrote:
\\ >> I'll have to re-read that proposal, but it didn't look like it supported
\\ >> multi-document framesets. At least, it didn't use multiple documents in its
\\ >> examples...
\\ >Good. This will ease navigation and make things a lot less confusing.
\\ 
\\ No, bad.  If it didn't support that the public will simply ignore it and
\\ continue to use Netscape's system.  Frankly I would too since the entire
\\ usefulness of frames is the ability to have different frames display other
\\ documents in relation to each other.
\\ 
\\ -MZ
\\ --
\\ Livingston Enterprises - Chair, Department of Interstitial Affairs
\\ Phone: 800-458-9966 510-426-0770 FAX: 510-426-8951 megazone@livingston.com
\\ For support requests: support@livingston.com  <http://www.livingston.com/> 
\\ Snail mail: 6920 Koll Center Parkway  #220, Pleasanton, CA 94566

True, but at the same time frames are limited in their utility because:

1. It's impossible to specify a parent document, so that if the browser
   does not support frames the parent does not appear correctly.
2. The relational semantics between the framed documents are unclear.
3. There is a lot of duplication of content anyway if you want to support a
   reasonable no-frames alternative.
4. They are impossible to bookmark and so on, so history analysis is
   impossible.
5. The frames are all specified in relation to the *current view screen*,
   an entirely graphical presentation based device. Not good.

I still think banner was a better idea, because it didn't suffer from 1, 3,
5. You could specify it as a link, so there did not have to be a
duplication in content.

The entire frames idea is a presentation issue, and should be treated as
such. The structural markup is completely hidden away. There is no reason
why the <link> tag (in the head) along with stylesheets cannot give all the
functionality for a much smaller penalty, without adding any new tags.

Sunil

Received on Friday, 6 September 1996 10:51:53 UTC