Re: Summary: FRAMES tag references

> What I would like to do with frames is have them work with browsers
> that don't support them as well as those that do.  As it is, you
> cannot do so without essentially sending the document twice for those
> that do support frames, once in the NOFRAMES content and once via each
> FRAME's SRC attribute.
[...]
> This is my main objection to the current frame design.  I'm sure other
> people have other problems, and Netscape should be interested in them
> all.

Mine is that frames as such don't belong in HTML. They are wonderfull
and usefull, but I think they need to be in different document type
(this isn't original - others pointed it out as soon as NetScape
revealed what they had done).

Doing this makes both document types cleaner - the frame document type
won't be limited to a syntax that is ignored by older browsers, and
HTML doesn't have to be changed to allow complete HTML documents to be
included in it.

It also solves the problem of needing to send the document twice in
some case. The content negotiation facility available in better
servers can be used to send the frame document to browsers that accept
text/browser-frame (or whatever), and a text/html file to browsers
that don't. Ideally, the text/html file can be generated on the fly
from the frame file (a TOC of the documents in the frame, possibly) so
only one document has to be generated.

	<mike

Received on Friday, 12 January 1996 14:54:45 UTC