Frames (was: Re teleconference - complex enough...)

Frames are a mechnism of _displaying_ different 
pieces of content in independent windows in _scrolling medium_
It is impossible to make sense of frames in other media such as print.

In other words, frames are a presentational hint, for particular media. 
Therefore, stylesheets should be used for making frames. 

I am not isolated in this opinion: 

"...Frames aren't considered as the way to go. CSS2
and its positioning capabilities is the preferred way."

Arnaud Le Hors  in
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1998May/0018.html

The WAI authoring guidelines should state clearly: 
"Frames only via stylesheets".  

HTML4.0 includes frames as a 
requirement from browsers, for backward compatibility with 
existing documents, not as a recommendation for authors. 
(see citation above, again)

People who wrote these existing documents aren't going to read the 
WAI guidelines anyway since they are doing cool things and don't 
care about the purist nerds from W3C or about their own readers.

Have you ever seen a frames site written in valid HTML4.0? 
I didn't. You know why? Only authors who care about portability 
write valid documents. But authors who care about portability 
don't write frames.

A realistic goal of WAI is to avoid new sites
written in HTML frames. For achieving this, one has 
to be very clear against HTML frames.

Regards,

Nir Dagan                            
Assistant Professor of Economics      
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Barcelona (Spain)

email: dagan@upf.es
Website: http://www.econ.upf.es/%7Edagan/

Received on Friday, 3 July 1998 07:04:00 UTC