Re: HTML4.0 draft: comments re: inclusion of frames

On 14 Sep 1997, David Marsh wrote:

> I'm also a little disappointed that you made no comment on my
> suggestion that an element similar to the HTML3.0 <BANNER> should
> be recreated to allow for the most common frame use, namely to
> provide an additional navigation bar. 
>
> My main concern with frames (apart from their non-degradability,
> which is important in itself), is that, unlike <BANNER> (which
> logically would imply only one banner per document), there can be
> multiple frames per 'page' which can lead to some grotesque
> 'designs' with multiple frames for logos, adverts, etc. 
> 
> This kind of overloaded 'page' takes long enough to download and
> layout on a graphical browser, and unfortunately, I suspect that
> the task of making meaningful layouting of this type of document
> in a textual browser would be well-nigh impossible. At least a
> browser like Lynx could, I imagine, easily make sense of pages
> with a single BANNER to the top or bottom of the document. 

The HTML working group has agreed to focus on applying CSS to
this end. You will be able to use a DIV for the same effect
as BANNER with the proposed CSS positioning features. This will
be nicely backwards compatible, provided authors think about this.
The missing feature is the ability to include the "banner"
content via a URL. A work around is to use either OBJECT or
IFRAME to include the content as a subdocument.

Regards,

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
phone: +44 122 578 2521 (office) +44 385 320 444 (gsm mobile)
World Wide Web Consortium (on assignment from HP Labs)

Received on Tuesday, 16 September 1997 06:10:35 UTC