Re: Frames and Documents

Paul Prescod wrote:
> 
> At 11:18 PM 8/28/96 -0500, Chris Josephes wrote:
> >Personally, I think this is more of a "bookmarking" issue.  Ideally, if a 
> >page has frames with multiple sources, it should keep track of every URL 
> >referenced when the bookmark is created.
> 
> That seems right: the problem with bookmarking is not addressing, it is
> remembering the state of the various windows. Even so, the more flexible
> frame tools in CSS-layout could help to alleviate the problem by allowing
> the author to put more stuff in a single file ("url") instead of forcing the
> data to multiple files.

This is *not* true - CSS-layout will make it more difficult to bookmark
framed documents, not less difficult.

If you access a framed document with a special CSS-layout description,
you won't have a one-to-one relationship between frames and urls (for
content).  For example, imagine that you have a document with three
frames, where the contents of two frames are stored in the same url
along with the starting point for the third frame, and the contents of
the third frame can vary independently.  A bookmark would have to
specify (i) the url with the current content for the third frame,
(ii) the url with the content for the first two frames, and (iii) how
to disentangle the content of the first two frames from the rest of
the information in that url.  As a result, you would have to store the
bookmark for that as a framed document PLUS additional information
(such as possibly the CSS description for that frameset) because
(i) the contents of more one frame came from the same url, and
(ii) at least one of the frames could have independent content.  

The simplest case for bookmarking framed documents is when the 
contents of each frame are stored in a separate url, because then the
UA just has to keep track of which url is being displayed in each frame.
In this case, the bookmark should look just like an ordinary framed
document.  It has to contain exactly the same information, so no
information is either missing or wasted, and the machinery for handling
display of ordinary framed documents already exists in current UAs, so
very little code would be necessary.  The UA would need to save the 
state information to a file (as an html framed document), put a link to
that file in the bookmark list, delete that file when the bookmark is
deleted, and maybe help users edit that file (if they just want to
change the bookmark a little).

David

Received on Thursday, 29 August 1996 12:43:21 UTC