Re: Frames - does anyone like them?

Mary Morris writes:

> 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?

A bookmark should be regarded as a kind of object which can be
used to retrieve something. Microsoft call's this a moniker in
the DCOM stuff. Continuing to think of bookmarks as URLs is
like putting on blinkers.

My view is that bookmarks should work for frames like normal
pages - the bookmark stores enough state to retrieve all the
pieces. Bookmarks are implemented as classes of objects.

One problem comes when scripts and some kinds of dynamic content
make it impractical to restore the state of a compound document.
This is a major drawback for hacking documents with scripts, and
I think should be made clear to the user so that she or he knows
that the current state can't be bookmarked. Users can then vote
with their mouse on whether to tolerate this for "normal" pages.

Dave Raggett

Received on Friday, 30 August 1996 10:28:30 UTC