When Netscape first implemented the use of frames a lot of webmasters thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread and used them in their web sites. Now that the initial frenzy has cooled down, what should we make of them and when should we use them?

Don't be afraid of using frames but wait untill you got your back againt the wall       Related sites I hate frames club In defence of frames Sites where frames make sense I hate frames club In defence of frames

'll admit right away that I'm not a big fan of frames, but nor am I an extremist. I do believe there are situations where frames are the best way to go. So why are they not suited for all web sites? Well frames have a number of drawbacks that alone don't amount to much but when compounded make a good case for avoiding them. They can eat up a lot of screen real estate. this might not seem like an important issue, but to me a bunch of scroll bars just serve to confuse me. Most of the time its not the frame's fault, but rather the designers wrongly assuming that everyone who surfs the web has the same window size, but when you use frames you are forced to make some assumptions on the window size of the visitor, which is also partly true for ordinary web pages and I'll talk about that in another article. You can't bookmark a framed page. Again this might seem as a minor issue but it sure is annoying when you want to. This leads me to a similar but more serious problem. Let's suppose I am making a web site and want a link from my page to a certain framed page. I can't link to the page itself as it is inside the site. this leaves me three choices, 1) A link to the site and give the readers a road map to show how to reach the page. It's not very likely that I would subject my visitors to this kind of treatment. 2) A link to the page itself without the frames. This has the potential disadvantage that the page might lose all it's navigation tools and identifiers. 3) Give up on that hyperlink. Sadly this is the more likely outcome Search engines are confounded by framed web sites; they either don't register the page at all or they index the page without the other frames. This means you can end up losing the whole user interface maybe even ending up not knowing where you are. These are very serious problems if you think a substantial amount of hits will be generated by search engines. These problems can be avoided, but only by duplicating a lot of your information. Printing a framed web page means you lose all the other elements composing the window. In many cases this is not a problem as that would only be navigation stuff, but when it also means you lose the identifiers. , people will sit and read a paper with no idea where it came from. So if you think there is a high likelihood people will print out the content, you need too think twice about using of frames. So when do we use frames? In my opinion we should avoid frames whenever we can. Most framed sites I have seen would have been better without frames. A tiny minority take on a whole new dimension with frames. For example, sites with causal relationships are great for frames.

© 1997 Carl Beeth - E-mail: carl@beeth.com URL: http://www.beeth.com/webopinions/frames.html