Re: Frames - does anyone like them?

Stephanos Piperoglou writes:

> "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.

This isn't really a problem. Yes, you can use a URL to point
to a document, but you can also keep additional info to point
into a document, and to hold state info relating to the last
time you looked at it. You could even place this stuff into an
HTML document using an OBJECT element with the state info etc.
passed as parameters.

You don't need to rely on URL fragment ids for addressing
with documents. For instance you could index into the parse
tree or less reliably use byte offsets from the start of the
file. This addressing scheme is interpreted by the object that
dereferences the bookmark. It does depend on vendors providing
effective api's for implementing such objects so I recommend
beating up on your favorite vendor.

For portability, when large documents are broken into sections
I would strongly encourage the use of semantic links, in particular
REL=Contents, REL=Index, REL=Previous and REL=Next as these reflect
the most common idioms that have proved useful over thousands of
years in the print medium. This will enable printing collections
of pages and provide support for non-frame enabled browsers.

Dave Raggett

Received on Friday, 30 August 1996 18:51:33 UTC