- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:11:21 +0000 (UTC)
On Mon, 12 Oct 2009, Peter Brawley wrote: > > > > > > I quoted Andrew Fedoniouk > > > (http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2007-March/010186.html), > > > "There are use cases when frames are good. As an example: online (and > > > offline) help systems ... In such cases they provide level of usability > > > higher than any other method of presenting content of such type." > > > > > > I've not seen a counterexample. Have you? > > > > I believe Andrew's statement to be incorrect. > > If your belief is correct, there must be sites which accomplish this > spec with tables + iframes (for example). No contributor has managed to > point to them. I don't know if there are pages that do this (and I sure hope none are using <table> for it!), but the lack of an existence proof is not proof of the lack of existence. However, in the interests of moving this on, I made an example here in about ten minutes: http://damowmow.com/playground/demos/framesets-with-iframes/001.html It doesn't do the resizing, and I didn't test it in IE so it probably needs some hacks to work around some bugs there, but it works fine for me in Safari. Resizing in a single page in general is a solved problem, you can probably slap a little JS on there and it would be supported too. (It should be easier to do, mind you; that's a CSS problem though, and affects more than just frames.) > > search engines can't index into them (search is a critical part of help > > systems), pages in them can't easily be bookmarked > > A DB row is a tree node and it must be possible to block bookmarking of such > rows. Framesets don't block bookmarking of such rows. They just make it harder. (A user can always right-click a frame and get the URL to bookmark it.) AJAX can block bookmarking of such rows, though. On Mon, 12 Oct 2009, Peter Brawley wrote: > > There are good database reasons to block bookmarks to table rows, so > that must be doable. That's fair enough, but framesets don't provide that possibility. They only make bookmarking significantly harder; they don't make it impossible. Indeed there have been a number of browsers over the years who have implemented various hacks whereby the user can bookmark the entire state of a frameset. The usability of such hacks has been poor, but the point is that if the requirement is that bookmarking not work, frames don't actually fulfill that need. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Tuesday, 13 October 2009 03:11:21 UTC