Re: XHTML and Frames

--- Gerry Reno <grenoml@yahoo.com> wrote:
>   I am very interested in how frames are going to work in the
> proposed
> XHTML specification.  One of the things that is coming to light is
> that
> with new portal implementations coming out that are using a multitude
> of server-side technologies to gain access to enterprise data, there
> is
> a current practice of making continual round-trips to the server to
> pick up data and continuous reloading of pages.  This makes for a
> very
> annoying user experience and results in unnecessary network traffic
> as
> well as in poor performance especially over dialup connections. 
> Additionally, all client-side technologies such as applets, DHTML,
> javascript, Flash, SVG, etc. are continually having their context
> destroyed and recreated with the constant page reloading.  This
> essentially renders many client-side technologies virtually useless
> in
> portals.  The way that this ties into frames is that the only current
> way of loading a section of a page without causing client-side
> technologies to lose their contexts (think of an embedded media
> player
> playing a video) is to access all server-side data via frames so that
> the main outer page DOM is maintained and therefore the client-side
> technologies contexts are preserved.  What is important here is the
> capability of dynamically loading new source into a frame in the
> browser using a scripting language such as javascript must be
> provided.
>  Portal portlets which are used to access server-side data can then
> be
> implemented as frames and controlled individually while client-side
> technologies maintain their contexts.  So for example a media player
> portlet can play continuously while other portlets load in new
> content.
>  This allows far less traffic to traverse the network and allows for
> a
> much richer, more responsive user experience on portal sites.  Please
> take this into consideration when specifying frame behavior in XHTML.
> 
> Thank you,
> Gerry Reno
> 

Just to follow up with another thought.  Due to the need for flexible
placement on pages there should be also be the ability to use inline
frames and not just frames layed out in rigid rectangular framesets.

Thank you,
Gerry Reno


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Received on Thursday, 7 August 2003 00:03:57 UTC