RE: Header, Footer, and Sidebars

On Tue, 25 Nov 1997, Andrew n marshall wrote:

> On Tuesday, November 25, 1997 6:23 PM, David Norris 
> [SMTP:kg9ae@geocities.com] wrote:
> >     Has anyone worked on including some means for creating dockable 
> headers,
> > footers, and sidebars in HTML or CSS?  A dockable header, footer, and
> > sidebar would be helpful for HTML accessibility and backward 
> compatibility.
> > This can be visually accomplished with frames, currently.  Frames, 
> however,
> <SNIP>
> 
> This can be accomplished with careful uses of CSS-2.  Here's is my one file 
> frameset:
> 
> http://www.media-electronica.com/~amarshal/Tests/divframes.html
> 
> IE4 is the only UA that renders this properly.
> 
> Note that much of the absolute positioning could be discarded if the 
> 'available' values or unit were implemented as I suggested the other day in 
> www-style.  This would also allow more flexibility in the fonts.  The 
> current implementation requires all size values be in absolute coordinates 
> or % of <BODY>, rather than conforming to the content (reasoning behind the 
> overflow values.

This approach does have a slight disadvantage: the navigation aids must be
reproduced on the places they link to, meaning

1) If they contain lots of images, etc., it takes longer to download the
page linked to.

2) Any change to the navigation aids must be made to several different
documents, unless they are embedded, which would would defeat the object.

Tim Bagot

Received on Wednesday, 26 November 1997 09:36:57 UTC