RE: Frames sites.

Joe Roeder wrote that navigating frames could be difficult because there 
was no way of knowing what frame did what. It seems to me that this could 
be solved by a combination of software which gave the name and title of 
frames (all frames have a name, in HTML 4 i think they can have a title 
too) and the page within a frame must have a title too.

As Joe pointed out, the title may not give precise enough information. 
But this seems like alt-text - sometihng that requires the author to do 
it right and use a name and title that can be understood by a oerson 
reading them.

There is not necessarily any sense to the way frames are laid out - the 
visual clue to a frames function can probably only be properly mirrored 
by reading the frames. Lynx has a nice way of dealing with them, similar 
to Scott's ideas but less informative. It displays the noframes section, 
and offers the frames as links.

Frames sem to me to be an evangelism issue - they are rarely used well, 
and the problems they present are not always very easily solved. 

(My pet example of Framed sites i hate is www.melbourne.org and the most 
depressing thing about it was that they asked my advice, and then ignored 
it completely. Lynx users will have a particularly bad time with it, but 
it is easy to demonstrate the problems by reference to such a site)

Charles McCN

Received on Saturday, 7 March 1998 08:27:54 UTC