Re: Frames - does anyone like them?

Mary Morris wrote:
> One of the biggest problems that I have heard from the usability
> people is that frames don't allow you to bookmark places very
> well because each frame is an individual document, thus you can
> get various combinations of documents. How are we going to deal
> with the addressing issues?

Gut feeling after considering possibilities: any solution that
doesn't require author cooperation won't be worth the implementation
effort. You might as well try to bookmark a results page from a web
search.

> I see the layout of the frames themselves as being a presentation
issue
> even though they are also a container. Even if you could bookmark
the
> URLs for all frames displayed in the window, you still need to
retain
> the positioning and sizing of the frames themselves somewhere.

I've been looking over the "frame-based layout via style sheets" note
at http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/NOTE-layout.html and so far I like
it. I think I just might blame some of my previous words on semantic
confusion. My criteria for acceptability is: will it allow me to
scroll text under a blinking headline? This appears to do the job and
then some. In fact, it looks as though I could have a blinking
headline with a blinking drop shadow _behind the scrolling text_!
This is to die for.

As a presentation aid, frames don't work without style control.

> It would be easy if you had all frames as fixed URLs except one.

With the style sheet proposal the relevant material could easily be
at the top of a framed page, making bookmarking no problem in sites
completely designed for frames. The framing could all be in an
external stylesheet used by all the pages.

Hey, wait a minute. What's happening here? I'm not a stylesheet
fanatic!

David Perrell

Received on Thursday, 22 August 1996 21:16:31 UTC