Re: Frames - does anyone like them?

On Fri, 30 Aug 1996, Dave Raggett wrote:

> 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.

This is not really the problem. "Bookmarking" in terms of what a browser
holds in its bookmarks is just a problem of current browser design (or
rather, shortcomings).

Without frames, a well designed document can be referenced specifically by
itslef and by its specific section. However so many people here have
mentioned that "frames are needed to represent very large documents". Well,
*especially* if this is a very large document, I need to be able to place a
hyperlink on *my* page that points to a specific section. And when it comes
to hyperlinks, not "bookmarks" in the Netscape sense of the word, I can
*only* use URLs. 

Now, if the whole of the document that is viewed full screen but *may* be
split into frames, then you can easily reference to document.html#section
and get the right section of the document, especially if only one "frame" is
the "main" frame and the others are just non-scrollable regions of the
document.

However, if the frame content is stored in different documents, well, as HAL
once said, I can't do that, Dave :-)

All I can do now is point to the "Frameset" document (as it is with the
Netscape spec) and let the user wade through this document until he gets to
the right point. Also, if the frames are in seperate docs, how will a
non-frame aware browser display them (unless we continue current practise of
designing seperate documents, which is *not* what we want). If we have a
single document, it will get correctly displayed on a non-frame aware
browser, only it will only be in one part. And how do we update more than
one frame at a time without the use of script languages? Unless you manage
to update the whole URL spec or the A and LINK tags, then you can't have
frames containing sperate docs.

Any answers to these questions?

= Stephanos Piperoglou = stephanos@hol.gr = http://users.hol.gr/~stephanos/ =
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Received on Friday, 30 August 1996 13:07:47 UTC